Black Widow, starring Scarlett Johansson, is said to have lost $600 million due to piracy. Due to the feud between Johansson and Disney, the film, which is the first addition to the MCU’s Phase 4, was all over the news. For the uninitiated, the conflict between the two arose after the film was released in a hybrid format in both the theaters and Disney+ streaming service.

Now, according to a recent report from Deadline, Disney paid a high price for releasing Black Widow on Disney+ because it became easy to pirate the film in multiple languages online. According to the publication, the Scarlett Johansson movie had been pirated more than 20 million times by August, according to a person close to them.

Given the $30 cost of a Disney + Premier membership and the amount of times the movie was allegedly pirated, Disney is estimated to have lost roughly $600 million.

Black Widow Lawsuit

Due to the tension surrounding Scarlett Johansson and Disney, Black Widow has been one of the MCU films that has received a lot of media attention. When Scarlett Johansson’s (Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow) film Black Widow — the first picture in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Phase 4 — was released in July, Marvel fans had varied feelings about it. In Avengers: End Game, Johansson’s character perished; nonetheless, the stand-alone film revealed Romanoff’s past and gave viewers insight into how she became Black Widow.

Because of the pandemic and during 2021, a number of services decided to experiment with the day and date, release model. It meant the same day studios put something out in the movie theaters it will also be put up on a streaming service. Warner Brothers had catastrophic results, losing hundreds of millions of dollars, but they may not have been the only one Disney also decided to experiment with a little bit.

Disney+ didn’t go all out. They decided to experiment with a couple of movies such as ‘Raya The Last Dragon’ and ‘Cruella’, but the one they decided to do with the highest profile was ‘Black Widow’. Which cost them hundreds of millions of dollars that they had to pay Scarlett Johansson because of a little lawsuit they got involved in.

According to the reports, $600 Million dollars due to piracy were lost. One of the big concerns a lot of people brought up with the idea of same date release is there’s instantly a full 4k quality copy of the movie is getting pirated on torrent sites and pirate sites. 

The same day release of Marvel’s Black Widow is probably one of the most controversial releases in 2021. The decision to debut the film in theaters and streaming simultaneously via an added fee for their Disney+ platform, reports of muted box office in a lawsuit between disney and the film star, Scarlett Johansson.

The movie also left the film open to pirating and as deadline reports. It costs disney a pretty penny and if these numbers to be believed per deadline, is claimed that black widow was pirated on torrent sites by more than twenty million viewers, which translated to Six hundred million dollars worth of views now. 

How Onsist deals with online piracy such as Black Widow

Onsist says “Stop losing revenue with anti-piracy protection” 

We have a set process through which we can protect your content online.

1. Find Shared Courses

Monitor the web for illegal copies of your contents by using automated search engines and trained specialists.

Monitoring Engine

Monitor a database of known piracy sites 24/7, and find illegal copies of your contents.

Trained Specialists

Trained agents will manually look for contents too.

Social Media

Specialists will monitor social media such as Youtube for illegally shared contents.

2. Remove Illegal Copies

Illegal copies of your contents will be reported by means of DMCA notices.

DMCA Notice

Notices will be sent to infringing sites to get illegal contents removed.

Contact Hosting

Hosting providers will be notified of their copyright infringing clients.

Search Engine De-Indexing

Infringing search results will be removed from search engines such as Google.

3. Reap the Results

Illegal copies have been removed. Now you can reap the benefits of your contents.

Client System

Get daily insights on pirated contents we have found and have reported.

Weekly Reports

Get a weekly report on the amount of infringements we’ve found and removed.

Increased Revenue

With illegal options dwindling, people will return to your contents.