Scarlett Johansson may have lost out to streaming, but there’s a fortune to be made from the new online model

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Hollywood’s talent agents should bear that in mind.

You will probably have read by now about Scarlett Johansson’s lawsuit against Disney over the money the star alleges she lost through Marvel’s Black Widow missing out on the extended exclusive cinema run she says she was promised.

While she was paid (according to Disney) a $20m (£14.4m) fee upfront, it’s through the back end that the real money is made, because the back end can be huge. Robert Downey Jr is, for example, estimated to have made $75m from Avengers: End Game, courtesy of his eight per cent cut of the back end. It contributed $55m to his total payday.

The problem is that the back end is evaporating in the streaming era, as Johansson’s experience shows. Sure, there are the additional fees that Disney Plus subscribers have to pay to get an early viewing of some of its new movies through its “Premier Access” offer, but if they generated the same sort of revenues as the box office returns from a traditional cinematic run, Johansson wouldn’t be suing.

The Wall Street Journal has put her losses at maybe $50m. So while the law will decide whether the star, who also served as an executive producer, has a case, she certainly has a point, and the nastiness indulged in by Disney, in describing her action as “sad” and “callous” while crassly referencing the pandemic in its statement, can’t obscure that fact.

This isn’t just an issue for talent working with Disney. Warner Bros, for example, is putting its entire 2021 slate out via HBO Max, in addition to cinemas (wherever they’re open) in the US, generating its own rumblings of discontent.

No one is quite sure how the model will evolve in a world where the pandemic is in the rear view mirror, whenever that might be. But no one thinks the 90-day window of exclusivity cinemas used to get, and which Johansson was counting on, is coming back now the studios have broken it.

This creates a problem for agents negotiating future contracts: how do you assess the back end in a streaming world? Eyeballs? The trouble with that is streaming services are loathe to provide the necessary data. Analysts have found various ways of estimating the viewing figures of their various properties but they are not without flaws. And eyeballs aren’t, anyway, the whole picture.

Subscriptions clearly play a role in a film’s success. Most hit movies are driven by stars, but quantifying to what extent is difficult. They may also play a role in securing retentions, to which the same rules apply.

So what do talent agents do? Simple: demand more money up front. Shoot for the bird in hand.

There have been a couple of recent instances where this has happened and they should be enough to get those agents drooling.

The first came courtesy of Netflix, which made a huge splash with the $469m it spent to acquire two sequels to Rian Johnson’s critical and commercial hit whodunit, Knives Out.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the only conditions were that the budget for each sequel must match the $40m outlay on the original, and that Daniel Craig must reprise his role as Benoit Blanc, the last of the gentleman sleuths. Because stars like Craig have power, draw eyeballs and drive subscriptions.

The estimated payday to Rian Johnson, his producing partner Ram Bergman, and Daniel Craig: $100m each. That compares very favourably to what Johansson allegedly missed out on, all the more so when you consider that while Knives Out was a big success, its $311m gross isn’t even in the same league as Disney/Marvel’s second-tier properties. One of those, Antman & The Wasp, raked in $622.7m.

What happened with Knives Out was clearly a major influence in Universal shelling out more than $400m to secure a trio of Exorcist sequels, which will also involve the so-far lightly watched Peacock, the streaming service launched by the studio’s parent Comcast, which owns Sky/Now in the UK.

None of that franchise’s sequels to date have come even close to matching the original’s critical, cultural or box office performance, which isn’t terribly unusual with a genre whose hits regularly spawn inferior retreads.

So there’s a lot riding on David Gordon Green, the director who managed to breathe new life into the Halloween franchise and who will be working with Ellen Burstyn, the star of the iconic first Exorcist film, who has yet to appear in a sequel. Her involvement won’t have come cheap.

In both cases, the films’ ultimate distributors have bet big. There will be some nails bitten by the executives who negotiated the deals until the finished products have received the verdicts of the viewing public.

Their employers’ scramble for the streaming dollar is what has resulted in the development of this new model, one which is working in the favour of the talent. Other stars, having taken note of what’s happened to Johansson, will inevitably push for a big piece of similar such bird-in-the-hand deals in the future.

Happy days for them, but the studios and streamers are inevitably going to get badly burned on some of them.