A few months ago, Scarlett Johansson’s lawyers threatened a lawsuit against Sam Altman and his company OpenAI for using her voice for its virtual assistant after she turned them down. Think Siri or Alexa but Scarlett’s voice when you use ChatGPT. Altman was an a-hole who apparently doesn’t know the meaning of the word no and the product came out using a voice that sounded suspiciously like Scarlett. At the time, people were like, “Bold move, bro, going after the woman who sued Disney and won.”
OpenAI ended up taking that voice option down, but ScarJo remains pissed off about the whole thing. I don’t blame her! In an interview with the New York Times, she talked a bit of sh-t about Altman, saying he would make a good Marvel villain “with a robotic arm.” She also spoke out a bit more about what happened with her Disney lawsuit, which was over the company violating its contract by releasing Black Widow in theaters and on streaming platforms, when it was supposed to be exclusively in theaters. Turns out, Scarlett has no ill feelings towards the company itself. She blamed it all on their leadership and I’m assuming she means then-CEO Bob Chapek.
“I felt I did not want to be at the forefront of that,” Johansson said about turning down OpenAI’s original request. “I just felt it went against my core values. I don’t like to kiss and tell. He came to me with this and I didn’t tell anybody except my husband.”
“I also felt for my children it would be strange. I try to be mindful of them,” Johansson added.
In the Times interview with Maureen Dowd, Johansson calls AI-generated deepfakes a “dark wormhole you can never climb your way out of.”
“Once you try to take something down in one area, it pops up somewhere else,” she said. “There are other countries that have different legislation and rules. If your ex-partner is putting out revenge, deepfake porn, your whole life can be completely ruined. I think technologies move faster than our fragile human egos can process it. And you see the effects all over, especially with young people. This technology is coming like a thousand-foot wave.”
Johansson says she initially turned down OpenAI’s offer to be a voice of the ChatGPT system but when the company went forward with the plan anyway, the actor turned her lawyers loose.
While Johansson’s feelings for Altman and OpenAI don’t seem to have softened much in the past few months, her attitude toward Disney seems to be on sturdied ground these days. The Johansson-Disney dispute, which preceded the incident with OpenAI, stemmed from Disney’s decision to release her Marvel film Black Widow in both theaters and steaming via Disney+ Premier Access during the Covid days of July 2021. Their contract had maintained that the film would be released exclusively in theaters.
During the legal battle that followed, Disney said Johansson had a “callous disregard for the horrific and prolonged global effects of the COVID-19 pandemic,” and revealed her $20 million salary.
But Johansson insisted that the streaming plan would cost her millions of dollars in backend compensation. “I don’t hold a grudge,” Johansson says now. “I think it was just poor judgment and poor leadership at that time. It just felt very unprofessional to me, the entire ordeal. And honestly, I was incredibly disappointed, especially because I was holding out hope until, finally, my team was like, ‘You have to act.’”
I wonder how much her blaming Chapek is from personal reflection and how much of it is wanting to still work with Disney in the future. I really liked Black Widow and think that ScarJo and its cast got screwed over by it being released so long after The Avengers: Endgame came out. It put BW so out of sync with the MCU timeline. That said, Scarlett wasn’t wrong that Disney’s decision violated her contract. If the roles were reversed, Disney would have sued her.
I remember how angry directors and actors were about the decision to make movies available on streaming at the same time they were in theaters. As a customer, I was really grateful for the move because we were in the middle of a global pandemic and it was awesome to have the option to watch new movies at home. Putting movies on streaming and charging people to watch it was a great solution for studios and viewers but sh-tty for anyone whose contracts were tied to backend ticket sales and profits. We saw the lack of revenue from streaming content play such a huge role in the SAG strikes last year. Hopefully their new post-strike contracts will ensure that this won’t happen to them again.
photos credit: IMAGO/Eventfoto54 / Avalon, Sean Thornton/Cover Images