#Black Widow Was Pirated Like Crazy, Steven DeKnight Wants To Make A Superman Movie & More

It’s no secret that “Black Widow” didn’t quite live up to expectations for Disney (or Scarlett Johansson) from a financial point of view. The studio decided to release the movie both in theaters and on Disney+ Premier Access on the same day. It suffered a massive drop in its second weekend at the box office and never really recovered. Now, we have some further context. 

As reported by Deadline, the movie was pirated an astonishing 20 million times. Per the math, if every one of those who pirated the movie had paid for a copy on Disney+, it would have been around $600 million in additional revenue.

Obviously, that math is a bit clunky, as not everyone who pirates a movie would be willing to pay for a ticket. But high quality 4K copies of the movie started circulating on piracy sites after the Disney+ debut. This made it easy for anybody to pirate an easily watchable copy of the movie. So one has to imagine that contributed to a greater-than-normal amount of lost revenue. It’s easy to imagine that this hybrid release strategy for gigantic blockbuster movies will be used sparingly in the future, if at all, as a result.