🏴‍☠️ Shadow distribution tops Russian box office

According to data from the Unified Federal Automated Information System (UAIS), the box office leader for the week in mid-May 2026 was The Parting, a nine-minute short directed by Mikhail Mikots. The film grossed over 65 million rubles, outperforming all legally released features. The last time a domestic short film topped the country’s charts was in the summer of 2024 with the release of Just a Minute.

Serving as a front for The Parting are major global releases that have received no official distribution in Russia: the sequel The Devil Wears Prada 2 starring Meryl Streep, and the sci-fi thriller Project Hail Mary starring Ryan Gosling. Such “pre-show service” screenings are currently available across dozens of cinemas in Moscow, including major theatrical chains such as Cinema Star, Mirage Cinema, and Kinomax.

The scale of the shadow film market

What began as a temporary, crisis-driven measure in the spring of 2022 following the departure of Hollywood majors has evolved into a massive and stable market segment. According to analyst estimates, cumulative box office revenues for unofficial releases over the past four years are substantial:

• 2024: 4.3 billion rubles;
• 2025: 2.8 billion rubles;
• Total gross (March 2022 – May 2026): approximately 7.7 billion rubles.

The absolute record-holder in the history of this scheme is Three Good Deeds, a six-minute short directed by Marta Kotova. Serving as the official legal attachment to screenings of Avatar: The Way of Water, Barbie, and Oppenheimer, the short film generated an astronomical 2 billion rubles at the box office. Another short film, How Much Does a Cloud Weigh?, pulled in over 1 billion rubles.

Mechanics and legal risks of the scheme

In addition to traditional “pre-show service”—where a viewer purchases a ticket to a legal, certified short film with a valid distribution license—cinemas also employ entirely obscured schemes. Under this approach, operators register a new legal entity to lease the auditorium and sell tickets directly for the foreign blockbuster; in these instances, the revenues are completely excluded from the official UAIS database. High-quality Digital Cinema Packages (DCPs) are sourced from CIS countries, primarily Kazakhstan, where local tech specialists have learned to bypass hidden digital watermarks and reprogram the asset files.

Although enforcing intellectual property rights for companies from “unfriendly nations” faces procedural friction in Russian courts, legal experts stress that utilizing copyrighted works without the rightsholder’s consent violates both international and Russian statutory law.

The landscape is beginning to shift from tacit oversight to active litigation. For instance, Samoylov Law Firm, representing Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., has already issued formal cease-and-desist notices to Russian theaters regarding the pirated distribution of Mortal Kombat 2. Consequently, Yekaterinburg-based cinemas Passage Cinema and Greenwich Cinema, which had scheduled screenings for mid-May, promptly removed the blockbuster’s listings from their websites. The surging box office returns are making shadow distribution increasingly visible, inevitably inviting mounting legal pressure from international rightsholders.