Russian distributors postponed Spider-Man to clear the way for ‘Kolobok.’ In St. Petersburg, the seats are still empty.
Five screenings of Posledniy Bogatyr: Kolobok (“The Last Warrior: Kolobok”) played in theaters in St. Petersburg on Friday, August 7, without selling a single ticket, the local news outlet Rotonda reported. Twenty auditoriums sat empty for Kolobok on Sunday, August 9.
The film again drew no interest from city residents on Monday, August 10: In 28 auditoriums, not a single seat was filled during the first half of the day.
St. Petersburg theaters have continued to screen the film on a full daily schedule regardless. The Cinema Park Grand Canyon on Prospekt Prosveshcheniya, for one, has scheduled 26 screenings today, running from morning to evening.
“The screens are empty, but screenings aren’t being canceled, because movie theaters are afraid that distributors will later withhold enough copies of Prostokvashino and Cheburashka, which would mean big financial losses,” a source at a major movie theater chain told Rotonda.
The source said distributors had counted on an “empty” release window, but that bet didn’t pay off. “When they saw that no one was buying tickets, they started offering special screenings featuring the cast. That only began a week after the release, even though it’s usually done beforehand,” the source said.
Posledniy Bogatyr: Kolobok hit Russian theaters on August 6. Distributors reportedly asked theaters to delay screenings of the blockbuster Spider-Man: New Day — set to arrive via Russia’s gray-market theatrical release around the same time — and threatened sanctions against theaters that refused.
The postponement of the Spider-Man film drew criticism toward Kolobok’s creators, and viewers tanked the Russian film’s rating on aggregator sites. The state television channel Rossiya-24 filed complaints with the prosecutor’s office and the Investigative Committee against online critics of the film, claiming that they had sent threats to the film’s creators. A criminal case has been opened over a death threat, according to the Russian Telegram news channel Ostorozhno Novosti.
Kolobok grossed more than 244.5 million rubles in its opening weekend, according to the Cinema Fund, which called the figure a record for the summer of 2026. Representatives of the Lyuksor theater chain told the outlet Podem that box office results depend on a combination of factors, from media buzz to the number of screenings.
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