The past couple years have been pretty weird for movie releases. After numerous delays throughout 2020, studios started trying their hand at same day releases of their biggest films on streaming platforms as well as theaters. The results have been hard to track, as has the fallout. We’ve heard from creators like Denis Villeneuve, who was pretty upset when his highly anticipated Dune adaptation was released to HBO Max. Patty Jenkins was similarly displeased when Wonder Woman 1984 released on the platform in December of 2020.
But perhaps no day-and-date streaming movie release was more talked about than Black Widow. The Scarlett Johansson-led Marvel film was one fans had been asking for for years which finally got made only after the character had been killed off in the main MCU continuity. Disney released it on Disney+ (for an extra fee) on the same day as it was released in theaters. That didn’t go over well. Johansson ended up suing Disney over it, claiming she lost as much as $50 million because her pay for the film was partially tied to its box office numbers, and the company had refused to renegotiate after deciding to go the streaming route. Since Black Widow, Disney has shifted back to movie theater-only releases for its Marvel movies.
Now, Deadline has compiled an extensive report on these same day streaming “experiments,” and it seems there’s another very large factor in the mix: piracy.
Same-day movie releases make piracy much easier
“Adding to the further erosion of box office for any theatrical day-and-date release on streaming is the fact that these movies are pirated promptly, with clean 4K copies in several languages spread around the world,” Deadline’s report claims. “By the end of August, sources in the know informed us that Black Widow had been pirated more than 20M times.”
The report goes on to estimate that Black Widow could have lost as much as $600 million due to piracy.
Now, piracy numbers are always a little hard to break down in finite financial terms. Are some of those people watching from places without access to the film in movie theaters? It’s likely. But with a number that high, it’s also not a stretch to say that at least a sizable portion of the estimate could overlay with people who would have actually gone to see the movie in theaters.
All this aside, the bigger thing than the dollar amount to me is the “clean 4k copies” bit, because there’s definitely something to that. By releasing movies to streaming platforms, it does make it easier for pirates to copy them than if they were theatrical only releases. Compare these new Black Widow numbers to the reports of how much trouble pirates are having accessing Spider-Man: No Way Home, where low quality bootlegs and malware-infested leaks are dominant. Not saying that Black Widow had anywhere near the hype of No Way Home, but you can’t deny how much more accessible the movie was because of its streaming release strategy.
Marvel movies accounted for 30% of the total domestic box office in 2021
All this aside, it’s likely that Disney isn’t hurting too bad from the piracy. Marvel films (including Sony’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage) roughly accounted for a staggering 30% of the total domestic box office in 2021. Black Widow, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Eternals, Spider-Man: No Way Home, and the Venom sequel brought in over $1.35 billion in North America alone, out of $4.45 billion total box office for the year.
When you consider that over 400 movies were released in theaters in 2021, those are some large numbers, with perhaps even larger implications for the future of cinema.
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