Ever since movies started going to streaming, Marvel fans have assumed that Black Widow would be thrown onto Disney+ like recent films such as Mulan (Premiere Access) and Soul (free with subscription), with Disney debunking that theory over and over. Most recently at the Disney Investor Day presentation, Marvel’s Kevin Feige reaffirmed that Black Widow would be released in theaters on May 7th as of mid-December.

Deadline has asked about the chance of Black Widow heading to Disney+ instead of hitting it’s May 7th theatrical release. His response seems to be both vague and politically neutral as it does appear to be that the distribution of the movie is truly out of his hands and really up to Disney at this point.

FEIGE: “If I had a crystal ball, I’d look into it and tell you. I don’t. All I can tell you is that for the past three years since Bob Iger brought me into his office and talked about a streaming platform that would become Disney+ and asked us to start working on programs for it. Our long lead plan was to have the MCU and the storytelling woven between weekly episodic big swings on Disney+ and into the feature big swings in theaters. It’s my great hope that that continues. Don’t ask me week by week what is going to happen in this world, I have no idea and don’t want to guess. Everything we’ve done at Marvel Studios has been based in ‘Ok, if everything goes perfectly, here’s what we’d like to do.’ And until this past year, things have gone remarkably well. And it’s my hope that the world gets back on track and we all get back into theaters, and that people will see and experience week by week for the low monthly fee of Disney+ of what we’re bringing there, and then be excited to get together with people again in real life and sit with strangers and share an experience on the big screen.”

We’ll have to see what Disney ultimately decides to do as they’d lose hundreds of millions of dollars if they simply put the film on the service for free such as Warner Bros. putting Wonder Woman 1984 on HBO Max and Mulan may have scared Disney to use Premiere Access again for such a costly film as it was restricted to Disney+ subscribers later revealed as not the success people had first thought.

The pandemic is getting increasingly worse in the United States and United Kingdom, despite the slow distribution of multiple COVID-19 vaccines. Theaters being a viable option in May or over the summer is increasingly looking less likely, but what Disney does with their massive Marvel movies remains to be seen.

BLACK WIDOW – In Marvel Studios’ action-packed spy thriller Black Widow, Natasha Romanoff aka Black Widow confronts the darker parts of her ledger when a dangerous conspiracy with ties to her past arises. Pursued by a force that will stop at nothing to bring her down, Natasha must deal with her history as a spy and the broken relationships left in her wake long before she became an Avenger.

According to Feige while speaking with The New York Times, the pandemic may have delayed some of the release of the shows by a weeks. Their film lineup apparently hasn’t been affected in any significant way.

FEIGE: “If the run we had in 2018 and 2019 had gotten disrupted this way, in the buildup to Endgame, it would have been a bigger headache,” he said. “With these projects, it worked well,” he went on, adding that the debut dates for the TV shows were shifted only “by a matter of weeks.”

SOURCE: THE NEW YORK TIMES & DEADLINE