The event is Marvel’s “Black Widow,” the most-anticipated movie of the summer. It is debuting all throughout the planet the present moment, “and the industry’s global weekend expectation is as high as $140 million,” Deadline’s Anthony D’Alessandro and Nancy Tartaglione detailed Wednesday.
Fandango says advance ticket sales have established a 2021 record, which signifies “Black Widow” has surpassed “F9,” which was June’s huge mile marker for the movie business. On Fandango, the film “is also beating pre-pandemic Marvel titles Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017) and Doctor Strange (2016),” THR’s Pamela McClintock composed. Obviously, there’s a huge load of repressed interest. “It’s been more than two years since a Marvel/Disney superhero pic (Avengers: Endgame) graced the big screen,” McClintock noted. “Endgame, which was released in late April 2019, was followed in July of that year by Sony/Marvel’s Spider-Man: Far From Home.” However you measure, it’s been quite a while, so this dispatch is a snapshot of film magic…
Disney’s expectations
Stateside, “Black Widow” opens in reviews Thursday at 5pm ET. It will open up for streaming, at a $30 value point, through Disney+ Premier Access on Friday. The streaming choice makes film industry forecasts and projections somewhat more convoluted than expected. However, the Deadline group said “Black Widow” “could weave between $80M-$90M in 4,100 theaters” while “Disney is conservatively eyeing $75M over 3-days stateside.” Either way, that would be a pandemic-period record, since “F9” got $70 million domestically in its first end of the week.
So by Saturday, Disney CEO Bob Chapek will probably be getting a few gestures of congratulations from his media mogul brethren in Sun Valley…
Lowry’s take
Brian Lowry writes: “My full review will run Thursday on CNN Entertainment, but it’s worth noting ‘Black Widow’ is positioned as a stand-alone entity, featuring the title character revisiting her old life between the events of ‘Captain America: Civil War’ and ‘Avengers: Infinity War.’ Of course, Marvel being Marvel, the movie still contains seeds that could be harvested elsewhere in its larger cinematic universe…”
Lowry adds: “Also, whatever the box-office tally, it would be hugely helpful to have some sense of what the Disney+ buy rate looks like — data that the day-date releases don’t share. Without that, there’s no way to truly know just how profitable (or not) the movie might be as well as the extent to which the streaming option could be cannibalizing theatrical revenue, as opposed to merely adding income from people who wouldn’t be inclined to rush out and see it anyway…”
Box office big picture
As the pandemic subsides in the US, film industry returns have been unstable. There have been a couple of breakout hits, namely “F9” and “A Quiet Place Part II,” yet huge misses as well, as “In the Heights.”
People are getting back to theaters, “but they are doing so selectively,” WaPo’s Steven Zeitchik wrote last week. “And those who work in Hollywood are trying to decipher why.” Here are some of the theories. I’m hoping that Universal distribution president Jim Orr is right: “There are a lot of reasons to be bullish — the light at the end of the tunnel gets brighter every week…”
