Whenever you see an interview with someone that works with Marvel Studios, often they’ll joke about the studio sending snipers and muscle to keep people from revealing spoilers or leaking information. This is often why interviews with Marvel Studios people are pretty dry and don’t offer many revelations. Well, according to Kevin Smith, there might not be snipers looking to prevent spoilers from leaking to the public, but there is a “secret police.”
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Speaking on his Fatman Beyond podcast, Smith talked about what he knows about the lengths Marvel Studios will go to make sure spoilers don’t leak. And while we’ve heard about actors only getting partial scripts or fake scripts and trailers that include footage that isn’t in the final film, Smith has spoken to people with knowledge of the situation that have told him there is actually a group of folks that take it upon themselves to prevent leaks and set traps for potential leakers.
“I don’t think this threatens anything they do or whatnot, but I thought it was an interesting factoid, coming from inside the world through many sources I can’t even tell you but pretty legit,” said Smith. “There is a Marvel secret police…so when leaks happen, not only do the Marvel secret police sweat the departments to find where the leaks sprang from, they also deal in subterfuge.”
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He continued, “We know this in as much as you’ll go to auditions and read lines that have nothing to do with what you’re auditioning for. They’re well-practiced at the art of like ‘look over here,’ they like to keep their secrets over there…They leave leftover call sheets where they draw allusions to characters that are well known that don’t exist. So they lay little traps in the call sheets to see if it gets passed on and then try to find the leaks thusly.”
Obviously, when you hear the term “Marvel secret police,” you imagine a SWAT Team with Captain America shields and Iron Man helmets busting down doors and roughing up people who might leak the latest ‘Avengers’ spoiler. As hilarious/awesome/somewhat terrifying as that would be, it’s more likely that there is just a more organized leak prevention group than we realized.
And when you’re working on dozens of projects at one time, each with the possibility of leaking to the general public years head of their premiere, which could cost hundreds of millions of potential dollars in earnings, why wouldn’t you hire folks to make sure that doesn’t happen. It’s something that happens quite often in other industries, such as the tech and automotive sectors, and it doesn’t seem all that crazy for it to happen in the film world, as well.
Moral of the story—if you’re a leaker who works, in some capacity, with Marvel Studios and you want to start some rumors, you should be careful. Who knows when the MSP (Marvel Secret Police) are going to come and get you?
