“Barbie” will appear in Russian cinemas from September 9

Greta Gerwig’s film “Barbie” will be shown in Russian cinemas from September 9. It is not a screen, but a “digital copy of the highest quality”, reports The Flow.

Cinemas in Moscow have already started selling tickets for “Barbie” according to the “pre-show service” scheme, writes the “Mash” Telegram channel. The tickets are actually being sold for the short film “Flora X”, and “Barbie” will be shown before it.

It was according to this scheme that the films “Avatar: The Path of Water”, “Batman” and the tenth “Fast and Furious” were shown in Russia without a rental certificate.

Russian viewers are expected to see Christopher Nolan’s picture “Oppenheimer” – the main rival of “Barba” at the world box office – according to the “pre-screening service” scheme.

Officially, Hollywood films are not shown in Russian cinemas, since the main Hollywood studios – Warner Bros., Universal, Paramount, Disney and Sony – left Russia in response to its invasion of Ukraine.

Now the largest cinema networks show Hollywood films actually underground. In six months, this practice has become so widespread that from January 2023, the industry publication “Bulletin Kinoprokatchika” takes into account such screenings as collections of Hollywood films, and not those for which tickets are formally sold.

According to the “Bulletin”, “Avatar: The Path of Water”, which was secretly shown in cinemas, could bring at least 2.4 billion rubles to the Russian box office. The third part of the movie comic “Guardians of the Galaxy” could collect 59.3 million, and the tenth “Fast and Furious” – 87 million.

• Since the beginning of the war, 41% of movie theaters in Russia have closed, and the revenue of cinemas has fallen by more than 80%. Russian entrepreneurs asked the authorities to allocate subsidies for cinemas or to allow showing pirated films, but they were refused.