The box office returns for Black Widow, as expected, are truly fascinating, befitting the first Marvel Studios film to be released since the global pandemic shuttered movie theaters around the world, and one of the areas where the box office is most interesting is seeing the oversized impact that male audience members had on the tickets sales of the Scarlett Johansson blockbuster.
Movie industry insiders were awaiting the results of Disney's bold dual release strategy, where the company would release Black Widow into theaters but also offer it to Disney+ subscribers for an additional charge of $30 as a Premier Access film. The initial returns were looking incredibly promising for the film, but then a funny thing happened over the weekend, ticket sales took a sharp dive.
Black Widow had an $80 million domestic opening at the box office, which is very impressive, but its opening day numbers suggested an opening weekend of over $90 million. For instance, its opening day numbers exceeded the opening day numbers of Spider-Man: Far From Home, Ant-Man and the Wasp, Doctor Strange, Ant-Man, Guardians of the Galaxy, Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Thor: The Dark World, but of those seven films, Black Widow's weekend box office numbers only exceeded the two Ant-Man films.
This was due to a stunning 41% drop from Friday to Saturday, which is extremely abnormal for most films, let alone Marvel films. Thus, it appears that what happened was that the so-called "fanboy" audience drove the film's extraordinary Friday results, as 58% of the film's audience was male.
This is likely why Disney decided to also reveal that the film took in $60 million from the Premier Access purchases (which would mean that roughly 2 million of the 100 or so million subscribers to Disney+ paid the extra $30 for the film), as that the combined $140 million would leap Black Widow ahead of all of those seven other films, as well as the opening weekends of the first two Iron Man films, Spider-Man: Homecoming and Thor: Ragnarok.
Still, it suggests that once the "fanboys" had seen the film, other audiences still were a bit wary of going to theaters. Luckily, Disney had the streaming revenue, as well.
Directed by Cate Shortland, Black Widow stars Scarlett Johansson as Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow, Florence Pugh as Yelena Belova, David Harbour as Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian, O-T Fagbenle as Mason and Rachel Weisz as Melina Vostokoff. The film is now playing in theaters and on Disney+ Premier Access.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter