This Week in Gossip #7

Why did it take Marvel so long to deal with Jonathan Majors? What was the biggest flop of 2023? How disastrous would a Warner Bros/Paramount merger be?

1. Jonathan Majors Found Guilty of Harassment and Assault

A New York jury found actor Jonathan Majors guilty of both reckless assault in the third degree and harassment. It took the six-person jury about four hours, spread across three days, to deliberate. He was also found not guilty of intentional assault in the third degree and not guilty of aggravated harassment in second degree. Majors' ex-partner, Grace Jabbari, took the witness stand and detailed an incident wherein Majors injured her during a car ride, then threw her back into the vehicle when she tried to leave it. Jabbari had not planned to bring charges against Majors. Rather, the case was a criminal one brought by the state of New York. that means, as noted by The Hollywood Reporter, "the burden of proof is higher for the jury who had to find proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt on each charge." Majors will be sentenced on February 6th.

I hate to admit how incredibly relieved I am that Majors was found guilty. From the moment the accusations were made against him, the actor’s team went into PR overdrive. His lawyer seemed to be in constant communication with TMZ, and the DARVO tactics were loud and clear from the get-go. Majors even tried to garner sympathy with a hilariously artificial video of him breaking up a totally real fight between two teens. We saw a lot of transparently misogynistic headlines smearing Jabbari for not acting like a “real victim” while Majors walked around with a Bible in his hand and new girlfriend playing the dutiful supportive spouse by his side (Meagan Good, are you okay? Do you need help?)

Majors' lawyer, Priya Chaudhry, claimed Jabbari was the aggressor, that she had gone "revenge partying" after the incident, and that she'd injured herself while drunk and on sleeping pills. While Majors played the stoic and teary-eyed man of faith, Jabbari was cast as a serial liar trying to bring down a successful Black man. That narrative didn't really work when the prosecution played a recording of Majors yelling at Jabbari for going out with a friend and saying she needed to live up to the standards of Coretta Scott King and Michelle Obama because he was an important man.

While this trial didn’t capture the public’s interest in the way certain cases have in recent years, it still attracted a number of misogynists, ambulance chasers, and gossip rags eager to make bank and spread a further anti-woman message in the era of the #MeToo backlash. The Daily Beast wrote about how many of Johnny Depp’s cultists seemed to be rooting for Majors, as though smearing victims of domestic violence is a sport of some sort. TMZ seemed all too happy to be the PR wing for yet another sh*tty dude. Then there were all the superhero loser fans who only see the world in terms of Marvel casting and were worried their precious franchise’s narrative was in jeopardy. Mercifully, that last group was pretty small, but overall, there just seemed to be too many horribly familiar threads tangled up in the discourse around this case, and it all tied into one conclusion: people will come up with the most absurd Gone Girl-esque conspiracies to smear a woman over accepting how dangerously common gendered violence is.

Misogyny is an industry as well as a form of societal terror. Most of the men who faced credible accusations of sexual misconduct during the #MeToo boom are still at work. Louis C.K. turned being a self-confessed sex criminal into the next era of his stand-up career and is winning Grammy Awards for his troubles. If you have enough money, you can not only make it all go away but turn it into a financial and PR-based boon. The Depp-Heard trial paved the way for countless abusers to wield the legal system like a weapon against their accusers. I’m glad some justice is being served here, and I hope that Jabbari can find peace, but I wish I had more faith in our institutions to not turn another instance of woman-hating into a business opportunity.

Speaking of…

2. Why Did It Take Marvel So Damn Long to Respond to the Jonathan Majors Problem?

Hours after the guilty verdict came in, the trades started reporting that Marvel Studios had fully dropped Jonathan Majors from their roster. A source close to the studio confirmed the decision to Variety. This happened months after Majors had been dropped by his talent manager, Entertainment 360, and his publicity firm, the Lede Company. He'd also been removed from a variety of projects, including a Dennis Rodman film for Lionsgate and a Spike Lee production.

Marvel and Disney certainly took their time. At the beginning of the year, Majors had been set up as the face of the franchise for its next phase thanks to his turn as multiverse-hopping Kang in both Loki and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. The second season of the former streamed on Disney+ this past autumn. The next Avengers movie was to be subtitled The Kang Dynasty. That's, obviously, not happening now, but given that Disney held onto that planned early June 2024 shooting date for Avengers 5, one wonders how eager they were to retain Majors overall.

As Matt Goldberg noted in his newsletter Commentary Track, "the most charitable read you could give Disney/Marvel in this situation is that they wanted to let the legal process play out." I imagine they were concerned about Majors and his super sketchy lawyer threatening lawsuits if they decided to ditch him quickly. But, as Goldberg also notes, that's not an explanation that holds a lot of water. Marvel has dropped people before. James Gunn was thrown out over some admittedly gross and offensive tweets mere hours after they were pushed to viral status by knowingly bad-faith right-wingers.