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War narrows the divides between east and west in Ukraine
Vakhrushev’s brief conversations often included the same exchange.
“Hello, everything okay?” he would ask.
“All’s fine,” his employee would answer.
“Did you hear that?” he’d ask. “Where was it?”
“Then let’s go,” he’d say. “And God willing, everything will be fine.”
The front line was roughly 20 miles from the factory where his Temp Ukraine manufactured building and paving materials, and Russian-launched missiles and bombs sometimes landed close enough to shatter glass. Even as they did, Vakhrushev and his team kept going. But their work quickly changed: Piece by piece, they loaded the firm’s equipment and production onto trucks for shipment to the safety of Ilnytsya, a town 800 miles away near the Hungarian and Romanian borders.
With Moscow continuing to wage scorched-earth campaigns in the east and south, Ukrainians have abandoned their homes in droves. According to the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration, more than 6 million people are now displaced within Ukraine, in addition to the nearly 5 million who have fled the country entirely.
Along with them have gone businesses and workplaces. Many, like Vakhrushev’s company and more than a dozen of its employees, have headed to areas in western Ukraine where fighting and missile attacks have been minimal. Their journey represents a massive and very fluid demographic shift taking place within the country — one that is altering it economically and possibly changing Ukrainians’ own perception of one another.
East and west are growing closer, Vakhrushev believes. “We teach them, and they teach us,” he explained.
In Transcarpathia, the agricultural region where Ilnytsya is located, Gov. Viktor Mykyta estimates that the population of 1 million has increased by at least a third. The sudden influx of people has strained local infrastructure. Many of the displaced are being housed in school buildings, and officials are scrambling to find them new accommodations before classes resume in the fall. Still, Mykyta stresses, everyone is being taken care of. “Transcarpathians are very hospitable people,” he said.
The upheaval has also meant other changes, which may be much more lasting. More than 350 companies have relocated to Transcarpathia, bringing with them new knowledge, new business know-how and new ways of doing things. Temp Ukraine, for one, is the first company here to recycle plastic waste as part of its manufacturing process — a welcome service in a tourism-dependent region that wants to keep its landscape pristine.
And with the number of computer specialists skyrocketing from about 2,000 before the war to nearly 35,000 today, Mykyta and his staff hope to turn the region into a tech hub. They are starting to work with IT companies interested in moving to the region and plan to add computer programming courses at the local schools.
But the shift of people and resources goes beyond economic benefits. The demographic changes — even those that are temporary — are helping to transform the country’s social fabric.
The divisions in Ukrainian society are often overstated, but differences among the country’s regions do exist. Ukraine’s west is mostly rural, Ukrainian-speaking and infused with Central European culture. The east and south are largely Russian speaking, with a cultural sense that, at least before the war, also felt more Russian. Many of the country’s largest cities are in the east and south, as was much of its heavy industry before the Russian invasion.
The stereotypes that the various regions held about one another are softening as they interact, according to Viktoria Sereda, a professor of sociology at Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, and Ukrainian identity is increasingly tied to a shared sense of civic belonging. The “fault line” in how Ukrainians define themselves is now whether “they defend their country in all possible ways,” she said.
“When people are living in this small proximity or in the same community, they are sharing their personal stories,” Sereda noted. “They have a possibility to see that it’s not how it was portrayed in media or by some politicians for the purposes of political mobilization.”
Amid the winding streets in the old town of Uzhhorod, Transcarpathia’s regional capital, the House of Bread cafe is a magnet for some of this sharing.
The cafe is the only local establishment serving Middle Eastern and Jewish food — pita sandwiches, falafel, salads, hummus and chopped herring. Its owners, Vadim Bespalov and Ella Kirilyuk, fled here from Kyiv and Odessa in the war’s first weeks and met in a religious service at a local church.
Before World War II, Uzhhorod was about a third Jewish. The Holocaust and postwar emigration decimated that population. Bespalov and Kirilyuk are both of Jewish descent and discovered that they shared a dream of opening a restaurant serving traditional foods. They rented an abandoned space on a small side street in what was once Uzhhorod’s Jewish quarter and opened at the end of June. A large menorah stands in the front window.
The cafe’s five tables were full during lunchtime on a recent afternoon, occupied by a mix of locals and those displaced by the war. Dima Halin, a videographer from Kyiv, discovered the cafe by chance. “It’s important that this place exists,” he said. “People need to meet, and food and culture is a good place to start.”
“This is a big cocktail that we call Ukraine,” Bespalov chimed in. “It’s all being mixed up.”
In Ilnytsya, the process of assimilation has gone a bit slowly for the workers of Temp Ukraine. The move itself was major: A couple of trucks hired in Kharkiv evacuated the company, making the two-day drive 20 times over a month and a half.
“Getting gas was the biggest problem,” Vakhrushev said. “That, and finding trucks and drivers willing to make the trip.”
Vakhrushev relocated with 37 people in all — his younger brother, Serhii, who also works at the company, their employees and members of their families. Their new home, a sleepy hamlet of 12,000 people that is nestled in the Carpathian foothills, is about as far as one can be from war-torn Kharkiv — geographically as well as psychologically — and still remain in Ukraine.
“The question isn’t where the firm is located. We still pay taxes in a single country, Ukraine,” Vakhrushev said from the company’s new facility on property that the regional administration helped him find. “The question is [whether] people can work safely, feel safe with the money they earn.”
The lack of industry and development in Transcarpathia was like going “back in time” to the 1990s, right after the breakup of the Soviet Union, when “everything was abandoned,” Vakhrushev said. Attitudes toward work also were quite different from those in hard-charging Kharkiv. Businesses close on Sundays, and laborers clock off exactly when the workday ends.
Yet things are going well enough that Vakhrushev now hopes to increase production and send more exports to the European Union next door. Bags of shredded plastic are piled up at the company’s new site, and newly pressed manhole covers lay stacked to one side. Serhii Vakhrushev praises the generosity of locals, who helped the company in getting set up and finding housing for workers. “They help us, and we help them,” he said.
Sometimes, though, it’s not the mileage from Kharkiv that underscores the distance everyone has traveled. It’s the small details, said worker Oleksiy Taranenko. After 70 days of shelling in the east, the silence of the countryside was “unnerving.”
“A completely different world,” he said. “Here everything is quiet. Birds are singing.”
Debate Over Monkeypox Messaging Divides N.Y.C. Health Department
The spread of monkeypox has ignited a debate within the New York City Health Department over whether the agency should encourage gay men to reduce their number of sexual partners during this summer’s outbreak.
Inside the department, officials are battling over public messaging as the number of monkeypox cases has nearly tripled in the last week, nearly all of them among men who have sex with men. A few epidemiologists say the city should be encouraging gay men to temporarily change their sexual behavior while the disease spreads, while other officials argue that approach would stigmatize gay men and would backfire.
The internal divisions peaked when the health department issued an advisory last week suggesting that having sex while infected with monkeypox could be made safer if people avoided kissing and covered their sores. Several officials at the agency were outraged, saying the agency was giving misleading and even dangerous health advice, according to several epidemiologists within the department and a review of internal emails.
The advice on safer sex was not medically sound, said Dr. Don Weiss, the director of surveillance for the department’s Bureau of Communicable Disease, in an interview. He believes the department should advise those at risk of monkeypox to temporarily reduce their number of partners, saying, “We’re not telling people what they have to do to be safe.”
His concerns are shared by some of his colleagues, emails and interviews show, indicating growing frustration and pessimism within the ranks of the health department as the window for controlling New York City’s monkeypox epidemic — the largest such outbreak in the United States — quickly closes.
Monkeypox has been spreading globally since early May. In New York City, where nearly all monkeypox patients are gay or bisexual men, there were 618 documented cases of monkeypox in the city as of Monday, though Dr. Weiss said that the true number of infections was far higher, because testing has been limited.
The strategy favored by Dr. Weiss, who has long played a frontline role in the department’s response to disease outbreaks, has received little traction within the department.
In fact, the agency in a statement Monday argued against such an approach. “For decades, the L.G.B.T.Q.+ community has had their sex lives dissected, prescribed, and proscribed in myriad ways, mostly by heterosexual and cis people,” the statement said.
The city’s response to monkeypox is grounded in the science and history of “how poorly abstinence-only guidance has historically performed,” the statement said, “with this disgraceful legacy in mind.”
The field of public health has long struggled with how best and even to what degree public health officials should tell people to change their sexual behavior in times of outbreak.
What to Know About the Monkeypox Virus
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What is monkeypox? Monkeypox is a virus endemic in parts of Central and West Africa. It is similar to smallpox, but less severe. It was discovered in 1958, after outbreaks occurred in monkeys kept for research, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The debate is influenced by the early years of H.I.V./AIDS, when terror and stigma ran high. The stakes are far lower with monkeypox, given that no one in the United States has yet died from the disease, treatments and vaccines exist, and for many the illness appears to pass relatively quickly.
Still, some epidemiologists say an aggressive response now — while transmission is predominantly limited to gay and bisexual men — could prevent the virus from becoming endemic in New York or reaching a broader swath of the population.
Some public health experts say that many gay men are likely to reject advice that could be seen as discouraging or stigmatizing gay sex. These experts say that such advice shifts blame onto gay men for the outbreak and could lead them to view public health authorities with distrust.
“Telling people not to have sex or not to have multiple sex partners or not to have anonymous sex is just a no-go, and it’s not going to work,” said a longtime AIDS activist, Charles King, who is chief executive of Housing Works, which provides housing and social services to the homeless and those affected by H.I.V.
“People are still going to have sex, and they’re going to have it even if it comes with great risk,” he said.
But there may be a middle ground, some experts said, noting that urging people to temporarily reduce their number of sexual partners or avoid sex parties where they might have multiple partners is not the same as a message of abstinence or monogamy.
“Name the risk factors and behaviors and give people options,” said Dr. Dustin Duncan, a epidemiologist of infectious diseases among sexual and gender minority groups at Columbia University.
He offered an example: telling people they could reduce their risk of getting monkeypox by “having one consistent casual partner as opposed to multiple people” seemed a reasonable message at the moment, he said.
Dr. Weiss said that asking people to change their sexual behavior — even if just for a month or so — was the most potent weapon available right now for reducing monkeypox transmission. Vaccine supply is limited and had been initially doled out via hard-to-get appointments during daytime hours at a few clinics, though mass vaccination sites have opened in recent days.
He has at times suggested the Department should promote short-term abstinence, a relatively fringe position. At other times he has suggested the department should warn gay men to refrain from anonymous sex.
Dr. Weiss said his recommendations have been largely ignored by the department’s senior leadership, who seem “paralyzed by fear of stigmatizing this disease,” he wrote in an email to colleagues this June.
“If we had an outbreak associated with bowling, would we not warn people to stop bowling?” he wrote.
So far, the health department’s reluctance to publicly encourage people to change their sexual behavior, unless they are actively infected with monkeypox, mirrors the broader messaging about the outbreak by the federal government.
The department’s advice, posted on its website, does note that “Having sex or other intimate contact with multiple or anonymous people (such as those met through social media, dating apps, or at parties) can increase your risk of exposures.”
At an online “town hall” event last week about monkeypox, the city’s health commissioner, Dr. Ashwin Vasan, said the department’s goal is to be “sex positive.”
“We want to in no way stigmatize sex at all,” Dr. Vasan said. “We want to be very clear there are certain activities and one of them is intimate sexual contact that places you at higher risk in certain settings.”
Other health experts, have, like Dr. Weiss, publicly called for a temporary change in sexual behavior. At an online briefing last week by the Infectious Diseases Society of America, Dr. Lilian Abbo, associate chief medical officer for infectious diseases at Jackson Health System in Miami, urged people to use condoms and said that having unprotected sex with multiple partners is “actually exponentially increasing the spread.”
“We all can take part preventing the continued spread, and that’s important that everyone takes a bit of ownership and understands that you can put others at risk,” she said.
Dr. Weiss, who has held the same job for 22 years, investigating and responding to new outbreaks for the Bureau of Communicable Disease, said he felt obliged to speak out publicly because he felt the department’s public statements were at times irresponsible. He pointed to the news release issued on Friday containing several prevention tips for “those who choose to have sex while sick.”
It stated that covering up monkeypox sores with clothes or bandages while having sex “may help reduce — but not eliminate” the risk of transmission. The release also said “for those who choose to have sex while sick, it is best to avoid kissing and other face-to-face contact.”
Dr. Weiss said it was “ludicrous” to suggest these steps would meaningfully reduce the risk.
The Health Department’s guidance to the public has often highlighted nonsexual routes of potential transmission, such as hugging or contact with bedding. While those are certainly possible routes of transmission, the result — Dr. Weiss said — was to make people overly concerned about casual physical contact and not sufficiently aware that most monkeypox infections in New York appeared to be transmitted through sex.
Dr. Weiss said he has supervised a team of epidemiologists who reviewed many of the city’s monkeypox cases. In most, patients have had lesions on the penis, anus or in the rectum, suggesting, he said, that the disease is spreading mainly through sexual contact.
He also said that reports of asymptomatic spread and the presence of the virus DNA in semen should have resulted in the department’s recasting their public advice.
“I know I sound like a Bible-thumping preacher,” Dr. Weiss wrote recently to a group of epidemiologists in a Department of Health email chain.
But, he has argued, “If we don’t act soon, it may be the point of no return.”
Sharon Otterman contributed reporting.
Arceus Leak Divides Shiny Hunters
A new Pokemon Legends: Arceus leak has surfaced online, and it has shiny hunters divided. The new leak comes the way of Riddler Khu, a prominent Pokemon leaker. According to the leaker, shiny Pokemon are shown in the overworld like Pokemon: Let’s Go, and Pokemon fans seem to largely prefer this, though there are certainly some shiny hunting pursuits who don’t love this mechanic. That said, while this is good news for most shiny hunters, it’s accompanied by bad news.
Adding to this, Riddler Khu claims that Pokemon can run away from players. In other words, you could spot a shiny, but that doesn’t mean you will get the chance to catch it.
Not related to shinies, Riddler Khu relays word that the game is very grindy. It’s not specified how much the grindiness contributes to this, but the game is also reportedly the longest main series Pokemon game to date.
In addition to being grindy and long, it’s described as being “hardcore,” with players needing smartly allocate resources, buy item slots, manage their inventory, and do things like craft Poke Balls.
Of course, it all remains to be seen if any of this true. Not only is everything here unofficial, but it’s also subject to change. As for Game Freak and Nintendo, neither have addressed any of this alleged information. We don’t expect this to change, but if it does, we will be sure to update the story accordingly
Pokemon Legends: Arceus is set to release worldwide on January 28, 2022 via the Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch OLED, and Nintendo Switch lite.
“Get ready for a new kind of grand, Pokemon adventure in Pokemon Legends: Arceus, a brand-new game from Game Freak that blends action and exploration with the RPG roots of the Pokemon series,” reads an official pitch of the game. “Embark on survey missions in the ancient Hisui region. Explore natural expanses to catch wild Pokémon by learning their behavior, sneaking up, and throwing a well-aimed Poke Ball. You can also toss the Poke Ball containing your ally Pokemon near a wild Pokemon to seamlessly enter battle.”
Halo Infinite Campaign Change Divides OG Fans
While Halo Infinite multiplayer is out in beta form for all on Xbox One, Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X, and PC, the campaign won’t be playable until the game fully launches next month. Ahead of this, 343 Industries has revealed a change it made while developing the campaign, and it’s a change that isn’t completely sitting well with hardcore fans. According to the game’s character director, Stephen Dyck, for the first time, the campaign has not been developed on Heroic difficulty, but Normal difficulty. As Dyck notes, this change was made because the team expects many new players.
“Traditionally, Halo’s always been developed on the Heroic difficulty, and we did the same thing for 4 and 5,” said Dyck while speaking to VGC. “So usually we look at Heroic, we’re tuning everything here, everything is scaled down a little bit for Normal and Easy and then scaled up a little bit for Legendary. This time, we spent much more time on the Normal difficulty, expecting new players to come in.”
Dyck continued noting Heroic and Legendary will still be hard, but the team has spent the most time making the game to be played on Normal, which in turn gives players more freedom to play how they want to play.
“So one of the philosophies we’ve had is, the player’s always right or the game says ‘yes.’ If the player wants to use something or a certain type of weapon, while certain weapons will be more successful, we’re never going to say, ‘you’re just wrong, you can’t do that’.”
For now, it remains to be seen what type of impact this will have on the campaign and its harder modes. That said, in the meanwhile, some of those who prefer to play on Heroic and Legendary are worried these modes won’t feel right.
Halo Infinite’s campaign will be playable when the game fully launches on December 8 via the Xbox One, Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X, and PC. For more coverage on the game — including all of the latest news, rumors, and leaks — click here.
Curtain Divides Men, Women at Kabul, Afghanistan, University
- A curtain separates women and men who share classes at universities in Afghanistan, photos show.
- The images are among the first to surface since college courses resumed after the Taliban takeover.
- Reuters reported that other classrooms are imposing even stricter divisions between men and women.
Some universities in Afghanistan’s largest cites have resumed classes but are now segregating students according to sex, photos and interviews obtained by Reuters show.
Classes were on hiatus after the US ended its 20-year war in Afghanistan and after the Taliban quickly overtook its capitol city, Kabul, three weeks ago. Some students are now back in the classroom, though photos on social media show that the Taliban has already imposed changes to seating arrangements.
Two photos showed men and women in the same classroom but separated by gray curtains. The women in the photo are wearing head coverings and long robes.
Students in Kabul, Kandahar, and Herat told Reuters in interviews that women are also being taught separately or confined only to certain parts of campus.
Social media handout/via Reuters
The last time the Taliban was in power, from 1996 to 2001, girls were not allowed to attend school. The Taliban also forbade women from attending university or going to work.
“I really felt terrible when I entered the class,” Anjila, a 21-year-old female student at Kabul University told Reuters. “We are gradually going back to 20 years ago.”
Women sat separately from men before the Taliban takeover, but didn’t have any physical dividers between them.
The Taliban has said that women will be able to keep participating in society under Islamic law, but Afghan women have been protesting in recent weeks, fearful they’ll lose their rights and freedoms.
Abdul Baqi Haqqani, the acting minister for the Ministry of Higher Education, said last week that women could go to college but had to be taught by female professors and separated from male students.
James Corden Stops Traffic in ‘Cinderella’ Stunt, Divides Social Media – The Hollywood Reporter
James Corden was trending on both sides of the Atlantic this weekend and for all the wrong reasons as The Late Late Show host’s latest ostensibly harmless stunt divided opinion on social media.
A Twitter user uploaded a clip of Corden and his Cinderella co-stars Camila Cabello, Billy Porter and Idina Menzel performing what looked like a segment of “Crosswalk the Musical” from his late-night show. In the clip, which has been viewed over 17 million times, a fully committed Corden, dressed as a rat, can be seen thrusting his groin at the car while singing the chorus to Jennifer Lopez’s “Let’s Get Loud.”
Judging by the most liked tweets under the trending topic of James Corden, the reaction on Twitter has been overwhelmingly negative and reignited a debate about the multi-hyphenate’s popularity.
“We will not forgive the U.K. for James Corden,” wrote one Twitter user. “What did we, as a nation, do to James Corden that he will not let us be,” wrote another summing up the most SFW sentiments, although much of the reaction was firmly in the mean territory.
James corden always looks like he’s trying to prove he’s the most fun guy to be around but the darkness in his eyes betrays him
— Sarah Hagi (@KindaHagi) August 28, 2021
London-born Corden seems to be experiencing a similar backlash he faced in the U.K. before he left for the U.S. in 2012, first to star on Broadway (winning a Tony award for One Man, Two Guvnors) and then eventually securing The Late Late Show gig as Craig Ferguson’s replacement in 2015. At the time of his departure from his home country, Corden was regularly the source of social media derision partly down to his cocky persona but also because of overexposure.
At the end of the 2000s, Corden was everywhere on British TV. He co-wrote and co-starred in the phenomenally successful BBC comedy Gavin & Stacey, starred in hit shows like Doctor Who, hosted several comedy panel shows, was the go-to host of awards shows most notably The Brit Awards and was a regular star in ads for everything from cell phones to supermarkets.
Corden’s current absence on British TV has reduced the vitriol to some degree, but there are regular flare-ups, such as this weekend and a few weeks ago after the first trailer for Cinderella dropped and inspired this piece in The Independent with the headline, “‘Nobody Likes A Narcissist’: How Did America Fall In Love With James Corden?”
There was a more embarrassing reminder of his unpopularity in May 2019 when Corden and the “Carpool Karaoke” team agreed to do a Ask Me Anything Q&A session on Reddit. The session ended after 3 questions after Corden was sent 700+ negative comments about his career and alleged events.
It might be rash to call this the worst thing I’ve ever seen, but I’m trying to think of something worse and coming up dry https://t.co/HVIlXSBShY
— Guy Lodge (@GuyLodge) August 28, 2021
The ever-busy Corden has achieved a similar level of ubiquity in the U.S. Alongside hosting his popular late-night show, complete with viral sensation segments such as “Carpool Karaoke” and “Crosswalk the Musical,” and his outsized social media following where he regularly hob-nobs with famous friends like Harry Styles, Corden has hosted the Tonys and the Grammys on multiple occasions, hosted HBO Max’s Friends: The Reunion, executive produced three TV shows and built up a healthy list of big-screen credits, including Ocean’s 8, the Trolls franchise, the Peter Rabbit films and Yesterday.
Corden, a producer as well as a co-star in Amazon’s Cinderella which debuts on Sept. 3, has also become something of a regular in big-budget Hollywood musicals. Since appearing in Rob Marshall’s Into the Woods, he has had notable roles in Ryan Murphy’s The Prom and Tom Hooper’s widely panned Cats.
“go to hell” is basic “i hope james corden gets cast in the movie version of your favorite musical” is smart, it’s possible, and it’s terrifying
— ٭ ky ٭ (@MelanatedMuppet) August 29, 2021
In The Prom, Corden, a straight man, was the subject of some criticism for playing the flamboyantly gay character Barry Glickman. “Corden, whose limited range becomes more apparent with every screen role, is torn between trying too hard and not hard enough as Barry,” wrote The Hollywood Reporter‘s reviewer, adding, “Perhaps aware of the potential minefield for a straight actor playing a flaming gay stereotype, Corden channels the mannerisms without the joy.”
After The Prom and Cats and now the reaction to Cinderella, the portion of Twitter where fans of musicals congregate has long gone off the idea of Corden appearing in a project. Despite all of Corden’s success, the sentiments found so routinely on Musical Twitter is beginning to spread and with the eye-rolling reaction to hip-thrusting stunts like the one from this weekend, it could be said that he is in danger of facing the same kind of backlash he did in the U.K., only now he has nowhere bigger to escape to.
Dave Bautista divides fans with post about Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow lawsuit against Disney
Dave Bautista has become Scarlett Johansson’s first Marvel co-star to comment on her lawsuit against Disney – but his words have divided fans.
On Thursday (29 July), Johansson alleged that the simultaneous release of Black Widow on Disney Plus as well as in cinemas violated her contract and a “promise” Marvel made before production.
The actor’s lawsuit says that her compensation for the movie was “largely based” on Black Widow’s box office performance, and had “extracted a promise from Marvel that the release would be a ‘theatrical release’.’
It continues: “Disney was well aware of this promise, but nonetheless directed Marvel to violate its pledge and instead release the Picture on the Disney+ streaming service the very same day it was released in movie theatres.”
In response to Johansson, Disney released a statement, telling The Independent: “There is no merit whatsoever to this filing. The lawsuit is especially sad and distressing in its callous disregard for the horrific and prolonged global effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Disney has fully complied with Ms Johansson’s contract and furthermore, the release of Black Widow on Disney+ with Premier Access has significantly enhanced her ability to earn additional compensation on top of the $20m (£14.3m) she has received to date.”
Disney has been widely criticised for its response, with Johansson’s talent agency condemning the studio for disclosing her salary.
As of writing, aside from Bautista, none of Johansson’s’ fellow Marvel stars have commented on the controversy.
Scarlett Johansson in ‘Black Widow’
(Marvel Studios)
After the news broke, the actor, who plays Drax in the Guardians of the Galaxy films, shared a link to a report on Twitter, writing: “Told em they should’ve made a #Drax movie but noooooo!”
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His post, which seemingly jokes that the studio could have avoided a lawsuit had they opted to make a standalone Drax film instead of Black Widow, has divided fans, with many complaining that he’s making light of Johansson’s tough situation.
Others jumped to the actor’s defence, arguing that he meant no harm from the message.
Dave Bautista divides fans over response to Scarlett Johansson’s Disney lawsuit
(Twitter @DaveBautista)
As it stands, Black Widow is one of the lowest-grossing Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) films to date with global takings of $319.5m (£229m), a figure that cinema owners are attributing to the simultaneous streaming release.
The film, which is Johansson’s character’s long overdue standalone outing, is expected to be her final MCU appearance. It was originally scheduled to be released in May 2020, but was delayed until June 2021.