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WIRE Buzz: Watchmen unveils Tulsa race riot comic; Scarlett Johansson teases Black Widow; more
The team behind Watchmen has joined up with The Atlantic to create a web comic about the Tulsa race riot of 1921, the real-life yet rarely taught event that opens the HBO series.
Written by Natalie Chang, with art by Clayton Henry and colors by Marcelo Maiolo, The Massacre of Black Wall Street recounts how in 1921 white rioters destroyed the 35 square blocks that made up Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma — regarded as “a beacon of black prosperity and security” — killing as many as 300 black Tulsans and leaving thousands homeless.
The stunning comic, which depicts what the Oklahoma Historical Society describes as arguably “the single worst incident of racial violence in American history,” can be read on The Atlantic’s website.
On a significantly lighter note, now that production for Black Widow has wrapped, star Scarlett Johansson is providing fans with some tidbits about the standalone film and her superspy character Natasha Romanova. Bottom line? The film is “about self-forgiveness” and “about family.”
“We just wrapped Black Widow like two weeks ago or something like that, so it’s very fresh in my mind,” the Avengers star said in an interview with Vanity Fair. “It’s a film about self-forgiveness, and it’s a film about family.”
Johansson continued: “I think in life we sort of come of age many times and you have these kind of moments where you’re in a transitional phase and then you move sort of beyond it, and I think in the Black Widow standalone film I think the character is at, when we find her, a moment of real crisis, and throughout the film, by facing herself in a lot of ways and a lot of things that make her her, she actually kind of comes through that crisis on the other side and we start to be able to reset where she’s a more grounded, self-possessed person."
The full interview is below. Johansson discusses Black Widow around the 12:15 mark.
Black Widow, directed by Cate Shortland and co-starring Florence Pugh, hits theaters May 1, 2020.
And finally, it appears that those opening day glitches didn’t scare potential customers away from Disney’s new streaming service. Citing data from research firm Apptopia, a story from the New York Post is reporting that Disney+ is averaging nearly 1 million new subscribers a day.
The streaming service’s mobile app has been downloaded 15.5 million times, and has brought in $5 million through in-app purchases in its first 13 days, which means that people are continuing to subscribe beyond its initial free trial.
Disney+ brought in over 10 million users the day after its Nov. 12 launch. By comparison, Netflix currently has 60 million subscribers in the U.S.
The new streaming service’s flagship original series, The Mandalorian, is already the most-viewed original streaming series in the U.S., having overtaken Stranger Things.