While screening the movie “violates both Russian and international law,” everyone, including Russian authorities, “turns a blind eye to it,” one film critic told NBC News.
Page A6From§Eachthe breakfast edition — 31 August 2026
Russian drones empty Kyiv grocery shelves as bootleg Spider-Man fills Russian theaters despite Hollywood's boycott.
As it ran on the front
Here's a pairing worth sitting with. In Kyiv, jet-powered drones are hitting the city hard enough that supermarket shelves are going empty — that's not a metaphor, that's the actual complaint from actual shoppers, reported this week. Meanwhile, a few hundred miles east, in Russian theaters, people are lining up for a bootleg print of the new Spider-Man movie, because Hollywood pulled its films from the Russian market and somebody found a workaround.
Put those next to each other and you get the whole shape of what a boycott does and doesn't do. Hollywood said: not our movies, not for you, not while this is happening. That's a real decision, made for real reasons, and it cost the studios real box office. And it worked exactly as well as you'd expect a movie boycott to work against a government that can still put jets in the air. The theaters just found a pirated copy. The seats still filled. The popcorn still sold. The only people who didn't get paid were the people who made the movie.…
…(cont) Meanwhile back in Kyiv, nobody's boycotting anything. There's no options page. When the drones show up, the bread aisle doesn't restock on schedule, and there's no workaround for that one, no bootleg loaf somebody smuggles in off a hard drive. One country's shortage is a supply chain problem with drones behind it. The other country's shortage is a marketing decision that got routed around in a weekend.
That's the con, if you want to call it that — not that the boycott is fake, but that it was always going to hit the wrong shelf. Sanctions and studio boycotts are aimed at leverage, at governments, at war chests. They land, eventually, on ordinary people buying groceries or buying movie tickets, and the groceries are a lot harder to route around than the movie tickets. The people making the actual military decisions are, notably, not the ones standing in either line.
So when people talk about how a war economy actually distributes its pain, the headline splits into two very different sentences depending which side of the border you're standing on, and only one of those sentences involves anybody going hungry. Worth remembering which one, next time somebody tells you the boycott's working.
“Grocery shelves go empty from drone strikes on one side of the border, and on the other side of the same war, they're still catching the new Spider-Man, bootlegged, sanctions be damned. Boycotts make headlines. They don't make Tuesday night in Moscow look any different.”
The receipts
Russian forces relentlessly battered Kyiv and cities in the region around the Ukrainian capital for a fifth straight day, leaving some supermarket shelves bare after repeated strikes on warehouses.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.