Samuel L. Jackson revealed in a new interview with Entertainment Weekly that his watermarked script for “The Avengers” was stolen from Marvel Studios’ production offices, leading the company to set up a fake buy after the stolen screenplay popped up online for sale. Marvel has since gone on to beef up its security protocols, even going as far as shooting down drones that fly over their production lots hoping to capture set photos and footage.
“They shot one down,” Jackson said. “And they followed one back to where the dude was. They found him and, yeah, they got him.”
“There are worse examples than that,” Jackson added. “I remember when we got ready to do ‘Avengers,’ someone printed out a copy of my ‘Avengers’ script that had my watermark on it, and put it online for sale. I was shooting in Canada and Marvel came to Canada. It had been printed in the production office… They found out who it was, dude quit, left the country. They set up a fake buy for the script, dude didn’t show up. It was crazy.”
Jackson’s “Secret Invasion” co-star Emilia Clarke also knows a thing or two about the lengths fans go to obtain spoilers thanks to her run on HBO’s “Game of Thrones.” When she joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe in “Secret Invasion,” Clarke told EW that she removed the SIM card from her phone on set so that no one could access her cell information. She said Marvel’s spoiler protection was so advanced that “Game of Thrones” took some notes from its playbook.
“When we were doing ‘Game of Thrones,’ when it started to get to the later seasons, some massive security changes happened,” Clarke said. “I was chatting with [showrunners] David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss] and they were like, ‘Marvel. We’re just learning from Marvel. Whatever Marvel’s doing, we just want to do that.’ So that became, you don’t print anything — and then there was like me and Peter Dinklage being like, ‘I need it on paper! I can’t learn my lines without it being on paper!'”
“Secret Invasion” is now streaming on Disney+.
