If you don’t have Disney Plus and don’t want to go to the theater, now you can finally check out Black Widow. The latest MCU movie has just made its debut across a wide variety of VOD platforms and can be purchased for $29.99 (the same price as Disney Plus Premier) on Movies Anywhere, Apple TV, YouTube Movies Amazon Prime Video, Vudu, Xfinity, Google Play, and many others.
Even better, this digital version comes with some fun extras, including the promise of deleted scenes. Here’s how it was billed on the official Twitter:
Scarlett Johansson’s swansong as Natasha Romanenko was warmly received by critics and fans, acting both as a farewell to the superspy and an introduction to her successor in Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova. But all this has been substantially overshadowed by Johansson’s high-profile lawsuit against Disney.
This out stems from Johansson’s back-end deal on Black Widow, which tied the amount of money she’d make to its theatrical box office. Disney’s decision to simultaneously release on Disney Plus as well as in theaters undercut that, and it’s become one of the lowest-grossing MCU movies to date.
This new release across various streaming services will bump up Disney’s overall profits, but Johannson won’t see any of it. The controversy is also likely to further impact its ongoing theatrical run (which admittedly would be ending around now anyway).
The physical release is also just around the corner, with Black Widow hitting Blu-ray, DVD, and 4K UHD on Sept. 14, a release that’ll hopefully come with further extra features about the movie.
Time will tell whether Disney’s release plans for Black Widow were a good idea. The litmus test will be Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings on Sept. 3, which Disney is adamant will have an exclusive theatrical release. With the COVID-19 Delta variant causing new paranoia about public spaces, I wouldn’t be surprised if it too falls in the lower echelon of MCU box office performers.
