You’ll have to wait until July to see Black Widow in theaters or at home.
Not long ago, Disney thought you’d be ready to go to the movie theaters by early May. Now it has changed its mind: Disney is pushing back the release of Black Widow, its next big-budget Marvel movie, from May 7 to July 9.
And even then, Disney is hedging its bets: Instead of insisting that you watch Scarlett Johansson in theaters on opening day, the studio will also let customers stream the movie at home, via its Disney+ service, for an additional $30.
Both of those developments are significant moves. In a single press release, the entertainment giant is telling the world two things:
- Disney doesn’t think there will be enough demand for its most popular and valuable movie franchise in a couple of months — either because consumers don’t want to go or because, in some cases, they will be prevented from going by remaining pandemic restrictions.
- And even when Disney does bring Black Widow to theaters in July, it is worried enough about demand to get rid of the theatrical “window” — the gap between when movies debut in theaters and when they are available for home viewing.
The collapsed window may be even more significant for Disney, since it was the studio that had previously insisted that it was committed to bringing its biggest movies to theaters first and keeping the existing system intact. For years, other studios have talked about, and in some cases experimented with, changing that system, but they weren’t able to do so because of pushback from the movie theaters — even as streaming services like Netflix and Amazon helped customers expect to stream big movies at home right away, without waiting at all.
The pandemic changed all of that: A year ago, as the stay-at-home rules closed theaters around the world, some major studios started to take high-profile movies, like Trolls 2, and let consumers stream them at home. And late last year, AT&T’s WarnerMedia said it would stream all of the movies it had planned to release in 2021 and show them through its HBO Max service, at no additional charge.
But Disney, whose movie strategy is based exclusively on big-budget films from franchises it thinks will draw huge audiences — Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar — has made a point of committing to traditional theatrical releases.
In December, shortly after WarnerMedia announced its shift to streaming movies, Disney told investors it was still planning on bringing Black Widow to theaters in May, even though it was willing to experiment with other release strategies for less-valuable movies. Earlier this month, for instance, Disney put out Raya and the Last Dragon in theaters and on Disney+ at the same time; it will try that strategy again on May 28 for Cruella, a riff on its 101 Dalmations franchise. And it has put other movies that had been scheduled for theaters exclusively on Disney+, like last year’s Soul.
Black Widow is in a different category than those movies — or, at least, it was meant to be. The announcement comes as increasing numbers of theaters are opening across the country — even Los Angeles and New York City, two major movie markets that have been shut down for a year, are starting to allow people into indoor theaters again, at limited capacity.
Covid-19 made governors popular, until it didn’t. Now, California’s Newsom may lose his seat.
One and a half million. Or, to be more exact, 1,495,709. That’s how many signatures are needed to force California Gov. Gavin Newsom into a recall election.
Thanks to the state’s affinity for direct democracy, a judge’s order extending the deadline to collect signatures, and Newsom’s much-discussed decision to attend a $350-a-person, unmasked, indoor dinner party — all of which catalyzed resentments governors around the country are facing over Covid-19 restrictions — Newsom, a Democrat, just might have to face a recall.
The California secretary of state’s office has released the total signatures received as of March 11. Of the 1.4 million signatures they’ve counted so far, nearly 1.2 million are valid. (The recall committees have submitted 1.8 million names, but some of the signatures are still being counted).
If the recall effort gets the necessary signatures, that doesn’t mean Newsom necessarily loses his job, it just puts the question to the voters in an election that will happen likely near the end of the year. A new poll from Probolsky Research surveyed 900 voters March 16-19 and found 40 percent of voters in favor of the recall effort and 45.7 percent opposed.
Newsom’s team is clearly taking the matter seriously, launching an official campaign on March 15 to “Stop the Republican Recall.” The effort seeks to tie the recall effort with far-right extremists like “anti-vaxxers, Q-Anon conspiracy theorists and anti-immigrant Trump supporters.” Newsom’s new campaign has garnered support from big Democratic names like Sens. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Cory Booker.
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Ballotpedia
The ballot, if a recall election takes place, would ask two questions: if voters want to recall the governor, and who should replace him in the event that the majority votes to recall. Hundreds of people could decide to run, as California has no candidate cap during recalls, and the winning candidate only needs a plurality to claim victory.
The last time a California governor was successfully recalled was in 2003, when Arnold Schwarzenegger managed to snatch a win from then-Gov. Gray Davis and over 100 other candidates.
“It’s an expensive, distracting pain in the ass for Californians if it happens,” Dan Newman, a spokesperson for Newsom, told Vox. “In the Davis recall we had 135 candidates and it was a total circus. Some people think we could have 10 times as many candidates this time around.”
FiveThirtyEight’s February analysis indicated that “Newsom seems well positioned to survive” a potential recall election, as California’s electorate has become a lot more Democratic since 2003 when Davis lost his seat.
In 2000, 53 percent of the state voted for Al Gore and in 2004, 54 percent voted for John Kerry — but Hillary Clinton tied up the state with 61 percent of the vote in 2016, and Joe Biden won 63 percent last November.
Additionally, Davis’s approval rating was in the low 20s and, importantly, his disapproval rating was in the high 60s, whereas recent polls have Newsom’s favorability rating between 46 and 52 percent. A different poll conducted by six California TV stations and Emerson College released March 15 had only 38 percent of the state in favor of voting to recall the governor, with 48 voting to keep him — but there’s 13.9 percent who say they’ve yet to make up their minds.
Recall organizers argue that it’s more important to note that Newsom’s favorables have been trending down, which they view as an indication that he has further to fall. And Newsom is facing the challenges of vaccine distribution, a worsening homelessness crisis, and getting kids back into school as quickly as possible, so they say there’s ample opportunity for his support to drop.
“If [Newsom] wants to project out that he’s not in a vulnerable position and pooh pooh the fact that he is in trouble and that he has upset his constituents, I’m okay with that. That’s tone deaf. There’s plenty of evidence that he is in trouble,” Anne Dunsmore, co-chair of Rescue California, one of the committees working to recall Newsom, told Vox.
The French Laundry affair, direct democracy, and a stroke of legal luck
So, if Newsom is still reasonably popular, why is he teetering on the edge of facing a recall election?
There are some structural reasons: Only 19 states allow citizens to recall their public officials. In California, the only requirement is that 12 percent of the total number of voters in the previous election sign on to the effort, and that those signatures are from voters in at least five counties. And recall efforts are incredibly common in the state — every single governor since Reagan has had recalls filed against them, and this is the sixth effort Newsom himself has faced.
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Jeff Gritchen/Getty Images
California has a strong culture of direct democracy. Citizens are used to voting on dozens of ballot measures which allow them to legislate by popular will, and are the only electorate since 1921 to have ever recalled their state’s chief executive. Born out of the post-Gilded Age progressive movement, “direct democracy, for better or for worse, has become California’s most distinctive and emblematic political institution. Initiative, referendum, and recall elections were added to the state constitution in 1911,” writes San José State University historian Glen Gendzel.
So, California governors are much more at the whim of their electorate than other governors. Anger with Covid-19 orders fueled many of the recall efforts against governors in 2020: Republican Govs. Mike Dunleavy of Alaska, Doug Ducey of Arizona, and Brad Little of Idaho, and Democratic Govs. Jared Polis of Colorado, John Bel Edwards of Louisiana, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Tim Walz of Minnesota, Steve Sisolak of Nevada, Phil Murphy of New Jersey, Kate Brown of Oregon, and Tony Evers of Wisconsin all have faced recall efforts.
But none have yet come as close as California’s to forcing them into another election. In fact, none of these states have ever successfully recalled a governor; only California and North Dakota carry that distinction.
But even so, Newsom might have been fine — were it not for the pandemic. The recall petition Newsom is facing now was actually filed on February 21, 2020, weeks before a state of emergency was declared in response to Covid-19. As a result, the petition itself doesn’t even mention the crisis. Instead, it cites some traditional grievances like high taxation and the state’s homelessness crisis as well as many traditionally Republican complaints like accusing the governor of imposing a “sanctuary state status,” failing to “enforce immigration laws,” and overruling “the will of the people regarding the death penalty,” among others.
Without Covid-19, however, the petition would likely be languishing in obscurity. In November, nine months after its supporters had begun gathering signatures, the Sacramento County Superior Court issued a final judgment extending the deadline to collect signatures. The Court writes that in light of the various stay-at-home orders, it had become “extremely difficult for petitioners to engage in signature-gathering activities for their proposed initiative.”
On November 17, recall organizers told the Daily Caller that they had only collected 749,196 signatures, which even with a 100 percent validity rate wouldn’t have come close to succeeding.
But Newsom can’t put all the blame on Covid-19 — on November 6, while a stay-at-home order that limited outdoor gatherings to three different households was in effect, he attended a birthday party at French Laundry, unmasked, along with people from several households. While the governor’s team initially claimed that the dinner at the three-Michelin-star restaurant was outdoors, on November 18, Fox 11 obtained photos of the governor indoors with several other guests, none of whom appeared to be masked.
EXCLUSIVE: We’ve obtained photos of Governor Gavin Newsom at the Napa dinner party he’s in hot water over. The photos call into question just how outdoors the dinner was. A witness who took photos tells us his group was so loud, the sliding doors had to be closed. 10pm on @FOXLA pic.twitter.com/gtOVEwa864
— Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) November 18, 2020
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Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies
