NBA Players May Get to See ‘Black Widow’ Months Before Anyone Else
The NBA is getting ready to resume its season for the first time since March 11, when the league shut down following the discovery of Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert’s positive test for coronavirus. The season is expected to continue starting on July 31, with all games played at — and all teams housed at — Walt Disney World’s sprawling complex in Orlando, Florida.
The logistics of moving an entire professional sports league to a theme park and its surrounding property is still being worked out, and reported on daily by the sports media. That includes what Disney World hotels teams will stay in (the Grand Destino, the Grand Floridian, and the Yacht Club) and things like who is permitted into what areas and when, in order to keep the risk of exposure to coronavirus as low as possible.
In a long Twitter thread about the precautions and preparations underway in Orlando right now, Yahoo! Sports’ Keith Smith dropped this interesting tidbit: According to his sources at Walt Disney World, considerations are being given to what sort of entertainment can be provided to the NBA players and their families during their downtime between games and practices (remember, they’re not supposed to go anywhere so that no one comes into contact with someone who’s infected). Those entertainment options apparently include Disney movies. “This is likely to include movies that have not been released to the general public,” Smith writes, “including Marvel’s Black Widow.”
Black Widow was scheduled for release in theaters on May 1, 2020, then got bumped by the coronavirus pandemic to November 6, 2020. Given that it was just weeks away from release before its postponement, it is almost certainly finished and sitting on a computer server somewhere, waiting for theaters to reopen. A lot of Marvel fans are probably very jealous of NBA employees right now — if not full-on trying to figure out how to get a gig working for the league in Orlando so they can sneak into a screening.
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