Comscore was hit with an antitrust lawsuit Monday, in which film distribution company Atlas claims the media measurement company leveraged its monopoly on box office data to “suppress competition” and ultimately forced them to shutter its CinemaCloudWorks software app.
Atlas claims in its suit that Comscore’s “unlawful conduct” has caused financial harm and reputational damage, and seeks to regain access to the company’s box office data and be rewarded an amount to be proven at time of trial.
Representatives for Comscore did not immediately respond to TheWrap’s request for comment.
According to the suit, filed in Los Angeles, Atlas is a longtime partner of Comscore, and since 2014 licensed its data of real-time and historical box office performance of U.S. theatrical releases for its web-based platform CinemaCloudWorks, which provided data visualizations and other “essential theatrical releasing services to itself and other theatrical motion picture distributors.”
But in 2020, Atlas alleges that Comscore began restricting its access to its data after identifying CinemaCloudWorks as a competitive threat, all despite Atlas still being still under a valid license agreement.
In 2024, Atlas claims that Comscore more than doubled its subscription rate from $13,885 to $29,000 per year, alleging that Atlas’ data usage had “substantially exceeded” expected limits. Atlas says in its lawsuit that Comscore did not provide evidence of this despite repeated requests before abruptly pulling access to the data in April of last year in a move that the company claims was a deliberate attempt to get Atlas to cease use of CinemaCloudWorks.
Atlas is seeking a preliminary injunction requiring Comscore to reinstate its access to box office data under the prior subscription rate of $12,000 annually while the lawsuit proceeds. It also seeks unspecified monetary damages, in addition to attorneys’ fees and interest.
Disclosure: Comscore provides TheWrap with digital audience measurement data.
