6 Thoughts About All the Reactions and Hot Takes in Response to Black Widow’s Box Office Numbers
1. Whether we want to admit it or not, we’re still in the grips of a major pandemic.
So Black Widow finally hit movie theaters last month, and the numbers are… well, not as great as they could be. As of the beginning of August (about a month after the film premiered), the movie has earned around $344 million at the box office, with that number roughly split between Canada/U.S. and overseas markets.
That’s not chump change (the film has made back its $200-million production budget and then some), and it doesn’t take into account the $60 million that Disney said the film made on its Disney+ Premier Access service in its first week of streaming. Even so, industry types are fretting, with the film’s second-weekend grosses dropping 67% from its opening weekend — the steepest any MCU movie has even fallen between first and second weekend of release — with its third weekend outing showing a further 55% drop in grosses. (These are numbers comparable to the much-maligned Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, which saw second- and third-weekend drops of 69% and 54.5%, respectively). Most estimates say the film is on track to make somewhere between $350-$400 million by the end of its theatrical run, not counting streaming revenue; if so, then that would make Black Widow the weakest-performing MCU film since 2011’s Thor (which took in $449 million worldwide at theaters).
With film studios and theater chains having so much riding on getting moviegoers back into theaters, almost everyone was counting on Black Widow, the latest movie in a hugely successful film franchise, to reel in the customers after a devastating year caused by the pandemic. But news of the film’s disappointing numbers has led to fans, studio executives and industry watchers arguing over what really happened; some blamed Disney’s marketing strategy, some suggested audiences might be getting tired of seeing superhero movies, while others (the ones we can safely file under “not to be taken too seriously”) leapt on Black Widow’s alleged “wokeness” as the reason for its less-than-stellar numbers.
This chart, however, suggests a different, slightly more logical reason for what might be happening:
(Table from the-numbers.com)
It’s certainly possible other factors were at play (except for the “woke” one; that’s just nonsense), but let’s not overlook the infectious 800-pound gorilla in the room. As I’m writing this, the headlines are warning of a new, more infectious variant of the COVID-19 virus that is racing through unvaccinated populations just as many jurisdictions in Canada and the U.S. are rushing to remove mask mandates and re-open businesses. Where I live, for instance, movie theaters that shut down in March 2020 were only allowed to re-open on July 16 — and even then they could only operate at a maximum capacity of 50% inside each auditorium with a cap of 1,000 people within the entire building. The rules differ from one jurisdiction to the next, but the bottom line is anyone expecting any movie to produce pre-COVID box office numbers under those conditions would have to be extremely optimistic about the prospects for this year’s crop of films.
Then there’s the not-so-small matter of making people feel comfortable enough to go out in the first place. As infection rates climb back up, consumers are less likely to go to places where they have a greater chance of being exposed to the virus. A recent survey of consumers by the U.S.-based National Research Group found 74% of respondents said they would be comfortable going to the movies, which sounds pretty good — until you realize that’s a five-point drop from the previous week and the worst result since early June. It’s a basic rule of business: you tend to make more money when people aren’t deathly afraid to leave their houses and spend it. So any talk of Black Widow’s box office that doesn’t acknowledge the times we live in is at best naive.
2. The challenges other movies are facing out there suggests this isn’t just a Black Widow problem.
If you need evidence that Black Widow’s performance might have more to do with (shrugs, points at everything) than anything specific to the film itself, you don’t have to look very far — especially if you’re standing outside a theater and looking at its “Now Playing” posters. Opening just a week after Black Widow, Warner Bros.’ Space Jam: A New Legacy — another hotly anticipated and widely marketed film — saw a similar second-weekend drop, with revenues falling more than 70% after opening to stronger-than-expected results. By way of comparison, the other big movies of the summer so far, F9 and A Quiet Place II, saw second-week declines of 67% and 59%, respectively, and are earning comparable numbers to Black Widow in North America (it’s a different story globally where F9 is on track to be the biggest American-made film of the year, nearly doubling Black Widow’s worldwide take thanks to the ease of selling straight-up action films to overseas audiences).
Both Space Jam and Black Widow were expected to have stronger holds because films geared toward family crowds had been performing well on the big screen as theaters began opening up during the first half of 2021, and studio executives hoped that families could be enticed back into theaters by the one-two punch of a Marvel movie and an update on a 1990s film that a lot of today’s parents remember from their childhood. But as July wore on and COVID-19 infections started to climb back up again, the idea of taking the family out to the movies started to sound less appealing to most moviegoers (especially for families with younger children who haven’t been cleared to get vaccinated yet). We’re now at the point where Clifford — the family film about the famous big red dog that Paramount was going to unleash on September 17 — is being pulled from a fall release, with other upcoming kid-friendly films likely not far behind. Bottom line: we’re not out of this yet, not by a long shot, and Black Widow is far from the only film that will see its fortunes up-ended by the pandemic before it’s done.
3. The numbers suggest Disney’s plan to release Black Widow simultaneously in theaters and on Disney+ backfired… assuming maximizing box office revenue was the studio’s primary goal (and I’m thinking it wasn’t).
While dedicated Marvel fans flocked to the theaters (in those jurisdictions where they could) on Black Widow’s opening weekend, those who wanted to see the film but were less keen to see it in public had the option to watch Natasha save the world from the comfort of their own homes. That’s because Disney opted to release Black Widow simultaneously in theaters and on its new Disney+ streaming platform (requiring subscribers to pay a “premier access” fee of $30 to watch it for a specified period of time, after which it will become another film available to all subscribers). Disney is not going all in on simultaneous release — Jungle Cruise is the only other Disney film out this summer slated for this kind of distribution, thought that might change if COVID-19 numbers continue to get worse — but it’s not hard to imagine the company treating Black Widow as a test case for how to maximize revenues in a rapidly changing business landscape.
No surprise, the National Association of Theatre Owners, a lobbying group for American theater chains, blamed Disney’s decision to release Black Widow on Disney+ for the film under-performing at the box office. “Despite assertions that this pandemic-era improvised release strategy was a success for Disney and the simultaneous release model, it demonstrates that an exclusive theatrical release means more revenue for all stakeholders in every cycle of the movie’s life,” the group said in a statement. And that may be true… for now. My feeling, though? Disney is okay with taking that kind of hit, because what they learned from Black Widow is that a lot of its streaming customers are willing to pay for premium access to hot new films on top of their regular subscription fees (to the tune of $60 million in the first weekend, according to Disney — not bad, considering the film’s $80-million take at the North American box office over the same period). You better believe Disney’s marketers are studying this rollout very carefully to learn how they can improve those numbers in the future — and how in the future the studio can become less reliant on movie theaters for its revenue.
If Disney is playing the long game here by using Black Widow’s experience to inform their future marketing efforts in a world where they might not necessarily have to share their profits with theater owners… then they might be just fine with Black Widow not earning at much as it might have in a theater-exclusive release. That’s bad news for movie exhibitors, sure — but the jury’s still out on what that might mean for consumers.
4. Piracy is still a thing, and it’s getting bigger.
While it’s easy to dismiss the theater owners’ statements about Black Widow’s sluggish box-office numbers as self-serving, they make a valid point about one problem with the film’s simultaneous release: piracy. Back in the day (i.e. before 2020), when films were shown exclusively in theaters for a period of time before arriving on DVD and video-on-demand services, studios could rest comfortably knowing most of their profits would roll in before the pirates could get their hands on digital copies to share on the internet. (You would get the occasional recording device smuggled into theater screenings, but the risks involved in getting caught and the low quality of those shaky recordings usually don’t make them hot commodities online.) But a number of factors have come together during the pandemic to see illegal downloading numbers skyrocket:
- studios are launching digital copies of their latest films at the same time they’re being released in theaters, making them more readily available for the pirating masses
- a lot of people who are out of work and living on reduced incomes are looking for ways to save money but still want to see the latest movies and shows
- a lot of people, employed or otherwise, are stuck at home with more time on their hands to look into this whole “illegal downloading” thing and learn how it’s done
- the increased availability and use of tools like virtual private networks that make it easier for users to avoid detection while illegally downloading content
- each jurisdiction deciding on its own rules for what businesses can open and which ones can remain closed has created a patchwork distribution network for film studios where they can show films in some areas but not in others — leading to frustrated consumers in places where theaters are closed turning to piracy to watch the latest releases.
Increased piracy during the pandemic helps explain the massive second-weekend drop-offs that movies in theaters have been experiencing this year. So far, Black Widow is the most-pirated movie of 2021, according to TorrentFreak; it shot to the top of the “most illegal downloads” charts the first week it was released, and as of this writing it has been alternating first and second place with F9 since then.
What does this mean? First, there’s a sense of “genie out of the bottle” here; consumers who got used to illegally downloading first-run films aren’t likely to go back to not doing that when the pandemic passes, and that will surely have an impact on how the studios market their films in the future. Second, we really don’t know for sure how many times Black Widow was downloaded via illegal channels, or how many people actually watched it outside of paying venues. The illegal downloaders (plus friends and families who benefited from their actions) might represent 10% of the film’s total audience, or look more like half of it, or might outnumber the people who paid to see it in theaters and on Disney+ — there’s simply no way to know for sure. What we do know for sure is this: theatrical box-office revenue is becoming a less reliable indicator of a film’s success, so maybe it’s time we need to stop using box office revenue as the sole yardstick for determining a film’s success.
5. Hollywood can’t will itself back to business as usual, no matter how hard it tries.
At the end of June, Disney rolled out the red carpet for Black Widow, with four cities (New York, London, Los Angeles, Melbourne) hosting advance screenings for fans and film industry folks (Florence Pugh, who plays Yelena in the film, showed up at the London premiere, while co-star David Harbour hit the red carpet in New York). In many ways, it was just like the publicity events from the old days, albeit scaled down and following the public health guidelines for each city.
These special events for Black Widow looked similar to other recent in-person premieres held for films and television shows like Ted Lasso and Jungle Cruise, while major industry events like the Cannes Film Festival returned to full capacity in July after cancelling in-person screenings the year before. Taken together, these events reflected a growing optimism among film-makers and fans that the industry was finding its way back to normal, just as the rest of the world was doing the same.
But then the highly transmissible Delta variant — first identified in India in late 2020 and detected in the U.S. near the end of February 2021 — started to spread among unvaccinated Americans in July, right around the time Black Widow hit theaters. As I’m writing this, companies like Apple are pushing back their plans to reopen their offices, and other entertainment companies counting on rising vaccination rates to help them salvage what’s left of 2021 are now starting to revisit their own plans to get back to business. Meanwhile, the rapidly changing public health situation is causing logistical headaches for both film releases and the fall festival season; the Toronto Film Festival, for instance, is offering a mix of virtual and in-house screenings but has struggled to land high-profile projects in part because no one knows what travel restrictions between Canada and the U.S. will look like in September.
All of this is to say: whatever troubles Black Widow may be having at the box office, whatever challenges it may be facing while trying to make itself into a cultural event of the summer… it’s just a drop in the bucket compared to the very real headaches that everyone in the entertainment industry is dealing with right now, just when they thought we had all rounded the corner and saw the approaching end of this pandemic. And no matter how badly we all want this thing to end so we can get back to doing all the fun dumb stuff we used to love doing, we need to come to grips with the fact that nobody — not even the biggest producers in Hollywood — can just snap their fingers, Thanos-style, and create the world that they want. We can only deal with the world we get. And right now, the world that we get is not a great place for making a lot of money at the movies.
6. All that being said, we can’t solely blame the pandemic for Black Widow’s performance.
Let me say it again: the pandemic has wreaked havoc on just about every part of our lives and the economy, including the entertainment business, and it would be the height of foolishness to pretend otherwise while discussing the grosses for any film coming out in 2021. Having said that… I don’t think Disney should get away completely blameless here; long before anyone thought about the words “COVID” or “social distancing,” Disney and Marvel Studios made a few decisions that, looking back, you could argue had a clear impact on how well Black Widow would be received.
Let’s start with the obvious one: the timing of the film sucked. And I’m not talking about how its release was bumped back a year because of COVID-19; even if the pandemic never happened and everything went as planned, Black Widow was slated for a May 2020 release, just over a year after Avengers: Endgame hit screens. Assuming the film had stuck to the original schedule in a different, COVID-less timeline, there still would have been the issue of getting moviegoers hyped to see a film about a character whose ultimate destiny has already been shown on screen.
“But that’s okay!” you might say. “It’s a film told in flashback, just like Captain Marvel!” True, but Captain Marvel was a flashback to the 1990s and made sense within MCU continuity, both from a storytelling and a film release date point of view. Black Widow, on the other hand, was a flashback to events in Natasha’s life that took place between Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War, when Natasha was on the run from the law after the events in Civil War. So why not release Black Widow in between those two films when it would have made more sense to do so?
One possible answer: Black Widow wasn’t a priority for the studio, until it was. Although the character was introduced in Iron Man 2 in 2010 and has been a major player in the franchise, production on Black Widow didn’t get moving until 2018, by which time Warner Bros. won the race to release the first successful female superhero movie led by a female director with 2017’s Wonder Woman. (Want more evidence Marvel didn’t see Black Widow as a money-making character? Look at the Lego sets and box sets released for Avengers: Age of Ultron that showed Cap riding the motorcycle dropped from the Quinjet instead of Black Widow, who performed the stunt in the film.) Without wading into any debate about whether sexism played a part in Disney’s business decisions, it seems evident the studio was playing catch-up when it greenlit Black Widow, a character that executives apparently didn’t see headlining her own film until they were shamed into doing so.
Pandemics, pirates, streaming options — they all played a part in stacking the odds against Black Widow being a runaway success at the box office. But I wouldn’t rule out adding Disney’s lack of faith in the character’s potential, either.
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