Black Widow pirating reportedly cost Disney $600 million

The day-and-date release of Disney/Marvel’s Black Widow is probably one of the most controversial releases of 2021. The decision to debut the film in theaters and streaming simultaneously, via an added fee on their Disney+ platform, led to reports of muted box office and a lawsuit between Disney and the film’s star, Scarlett Johansson. The move also left the film open to pirating and, as “Deadline” reports, it cost Disney a pretty penny if these numbers are to be believed.

Per “Deadline“, it’s claimed that Black Widow was pirated on torrent sites by more than 20 million viewers which translated to $600 million worth of views. Now, this could be some fancy Hollywood accounting and a bit exaggerated but the report states, “Following Black Widow, it was clear that day-and-date leads to a freefall at the box office in the subsequent weekend of a Marvel Cinematic Universe title; the Scarlett Johansson movie weathered the worst second-weekend drop for a Disney-distributed Marvel movie at 68%. The crimping in windows, which of course impacted the star’s bonus, led to the twice-Oscar-nominated actress suing Disney and settling for a reported $40M+.” The second-weekend collapse is a reference to the film’s stellar $80 million theatrical opening which was followed by a steep decline to $26.5 million in weekend two.

The report goes on to say, “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. By the end of August, sources in the know informed us that Black Widow had been pirated more than 20M times. That’s close to a $600M estimated loss on Black Widow in Disney+ PVOD revenue alone.”

Another interesting tidbit is that the Disney+ Premier Access release model also costs Disney money because they have to shell out 15% to the software and hardware that offers the Disney+ app. That means Google Play, Amazon Firestick, and other similar stores take a piece of the streaming pie and that’s why it’s a bit murky in regards to how successful a strategy like this actually was for Disney. Was it really worth the headache to publicly be called out in a lawsuit by the film’s star? Sure, the lawsuit was settled and everyone is playing nice now but it’s clear that this release model left the film open to be pirated and shared frequently which muted its potential legs at the box office. This became the basis of Johansson’s lawsuit because, as an executive producer on the project, she was guaranteed a percentage of the film’s box office and the streaming release clearly hampered its potential.

Do YOU think the pirating of Black Widow actually cost Disney $600 million?