In a St. Petersburg cinema, a cluster of young people dressed in Spider-Man suits gathered to watch earlier instalments of the franchise. Before the screening was over, they had signed a petition against a film they had not yet seen: a Russian family comedy about a talking, anthropomorphic bread roll. The target of their ire was not the character itself, but the fact that its cinematic outing had, in their view, pushed back the local release of Spider-Man: Brand New Day.

The superhero blockbuster, which had its global premiere on 31 July, was originally expected to reach Russian screens on 6 August via the informal “pre-screening service” model that has become the default route for Hollywood titles since major studios withdrew from the market. Instead, the distributor of the domestic fairy tale The Last Warrior: Kolobok, together with the Association of Cinema Owners, proposed an “anti-piracy initiative” urging venues to delay Spider-Man until 20 August. Cinemas were warned that showing the Marvel film simultaneously with Kolobok could lead to a review of “further conditions of cooperation.” The superhero film’s release was duly postponed.

The episode illuminates the precarious ecosystem of Russian film exhibition, where state-supported productions jostle with unlicensed foreign imports. Kolobok, directed by Anton Maslov, received 250 million roubles from the state Film Fund. Its promotional guidelines, reported by the trade outlet Cinemaplex, instructed partners to avoid mentioning the Walt Disney Company, which had previously distributed the franchise, and to refrain from referring to the film as part of the Last Warrior series at all. Meanwhile, a pirated Russian-dubbed copy of Spider-Man: Brand New Day that surfaced online contained its own act of cultural substitution: in a scene where the hero meets Black Widow, the original soundtrack’s use of the song “Monopolia” by the Russian artist Monetochka was replaced with Rihanna’s “S&M.”

The audience response was swift and algorithmic. On the night before Kolobok’s premiere, the film received thousands of ratings on the Kinopoisk platform, over 90 per cent of them negative. The service announced that its systems had identified the activity as anomalous and would not count “the ratings of such a flashmob,” leaving the film’s score blank. Reports also circulated of near-empty screenings in several Moscow cinemas on the eve of release. Yelena Yampolskaya, a presidential advisor, voiced her longstanding opposition to unlicensed screenings, telling Rossiyskaya Gazeta that “it is not always clear what will actually be shown. One thing may be announced, and something completely different presented.”

For now, the rating for Kolobok remains absent from Kinopoisk, a deliberate void where a number should sit. The Spider-Man fans in St. Petersburg have made their gesture; the bread roll, for its part, has yet to find an audience.