Can you, respectfully, stop with the "you don't get the point"? "Not agreeing with you" or "Not flooding the thread with emojis" is not the same as "not getting the point". I get the friggin' point.
For starters, I'm not looking for you to agree with me. I can count on one hand the number of times you've done that (one of them used to be in my sig it was such a rare occurrence
). But with as much respect in return, from my vantage point I don't think you do, because you keep coming back to Premier Access being nothing new, or nothing that couldn't have been foreseen (see point earlier about HBO renegotiating their contracts to accommodate for HBO Max). Accounting for redirected revenues to Premier Access is precisely the point.
And they absolutely did have a way to monetize it; that's the "on-demand"/PPV mechanism. Whether something is in a theater or not is immaterial as to whether you can individually charge for a title or not.
Fair point, I was thinking only about subscription streaming services, and being unable to specifically monetize something through a subscription fee, so you're right in the on-demand/PPV/physical sales distribution methods. I'll grant you that. Perhaps you can acknowledge that those distribution channels have NEVER been used for a Day 1 release from a major studio for a major motion picture - particularly a 'summer blockbuster'. And the likelihood of "seeing the future" and coming to the conclusion that it would be released through additional channels is as reasonable as thinking everyone involved should've 'seen the future' of a global pandemic.
You both may actually be right, IF the language supports that. If ScarJo can prove Disney never even CONTEMPLATED this release before, then that changes the discussion measurably. I'm just pointing out that there is a lot of weight resting on a foundation of assumptions that we cannot know at this point, some of which don't sustain logical analysis.
Has Disney publicly indicated that they did consider it? The first public acknowledgement I can find of Premier Access is
the announcement in August 2020 during it's Q3 earnings release that Mulan would be released as such - 3 months after the original planned release of Black Widow. If the notion of what Premier Access represents is not reflected in the contract language, then I'm unsure who owns the burden of proving/disproving this. If her salary was specifically negotiated (by both parties) to be primarily driven by box office sales, and Disney had an undisclosed plan to redirect that revenue, I'd say that's acting in bad faith.
If my company gave me a compensation plan heavily weighted on commissions earned in my territory (example - Banks New York), then on Day 1 severely limited my territory (ie, they assign me banks in Buffalo, New York), I think I'd have a reasonable beef.
As I've said... if Disney is accounting for Premier Access as part of the % of revenue that she is getting paid on, then I'm firmly on Team Disney. If they are not, then I think she has a viable beef.