Fin: ‘Godzilla,’ ‘Lanterns,’ and why legal action over spoilers is wrong

One of the more contentious subjects in movie discussion is that of spoilers. Many moviegoers don’t want to know the secrets of movies they haven’t seen yet—especially in the superhero genre—yet an entire content ecosystem exists to unearth those spoilers before the movies arrive.

I’m generally agnostic on the matter. Like anyone else, I like to be surprised when I see a movie, and I generally give out spoiler warnings before sharing things when I’m writing about a new movie. But overall, spoilers don’t take up that much bandwidth in my thinking about film.

I certainly don’t believe, as one person argued in 2019 ahead of the release of Avengers: Endgame, that the MPAA should fine people who spoil movies in advance. The MPAA does not and never could have the power to do such a thing, nor should you deputize yourself as an enforcer of movie companies’ copyrights. You’re not, after all, Disney’s lawyer.

Besides, the studios’ actual lawyers are busy enough doing just that.

Back in April, a 39-year-old Japanese man who ran a spoiler site was sentenced to prison after his site posted spoilers for the then-upcoming Godzilla Minus One and the Overlord anime adaptation. Toho and another company took him to court, and he got prison time.

Now, because of the First Amendment and Section 230, a guy in America who did that almost certainly wouldn't face criminal punishment. But he could certainly get sued. And something like that recently happened.

According to Puck, Warner Bros Discovery recently took legal action against the website Cosmic Book News, after it seemingly revealed the ending of the first episode of the new HBO comic book show Lanterns:

The premiere episode’s final moments delivered a shocking fate for one of the show’s central characters. I won’t spoil it, but Cosmic Book News, an independent pop-culture news site, had been reading the tea leaves for months—studying the casting choices, promotional footage, and clues about the show’s timeline. By March, editor Matt McGloin was predicting the ending outright.

Then, on July 10, two weeks before Comic-Con, an anonymous Reddit post purported to reveal the plot twist. The rumor quickly spread to X, where Warner Bros. Discovery’s copyright machinery whirred into action. An HBO Max social strategist submitted a takedown notice covering six posts from five accounts, including Cosmic Book News, describing the purported infringement as “people discussing the spoilers of the first episode of Lanterns.”

Now I should note that I don’t especially care about that show. Nor am I much of a fan of that particular site, which when I’ve read it seems to consist mostly of dodgy rumors, Snyder Cut wishcasting, and lazy anti-woke stuff.

But I’m on their side on this one- this is a major studio and corporation bigfooting a small media outlet, when it sounds an awful lot like they merely correctly guessed a plot twist, whether than affirmatively revealing it. Warner Bros has expensive lawyers, but Cosmic Book News probably doesn’t.

This is not, as Puck is clear, an ongoing lawsuit, as Warner “already got what it wanted with the takedowns—keeping the plot reveal momentarily obscured.”

Even so, this sets a bit of a troubling precedent.

There’s a creepy guy in a horror movie mask who’s been harrassing people around Center City Philadelphia. But then, this week, a young woman karate-kicked him, and told her story to 6ABC, including a re-enactment of the kick:

My friend, the Philadelphia journalist Dan McQuade, passed away back in January. Seldom has a week gone by since then without some news story making me say, “I wish Dan was still around, to react or write about this.”

I could go down the list, starting with the Sixers getting LeBron James. But I really think there’s been no greater “Dan would have loved this” story yet than a real life horror villain terrorizing Center City, a Philadelphia woman karate-kicking him, and then that woman giving a man-on-the-street interview about it on the local news, in the “unlike Agholor” tradition.