If they let that fill go out to the public, then they would have lost some major sources of future income.
I believe the Black Widow film didn't do so well because although it was a prequel, they had killed off her character in a prior film, and audiences weren't so excited about seeing a character they knew will soon be dead.
This very well could be. My kid keeps up with all of this stuff and he said they were going to reboot the DC film franchise, starting with a Flash movie, and the weirdo that played Flash in the Justice League movies went off the deep end, and effectively messed up their plans. New people are in fact in charge of the project and this may be part of their plan.
Characters get unkilled in comics all the time. So far the movies haven’t gone down that path, but they can, and will at some point.
Black Widow’s problem was they put it on the stream at the time, still in the covid fear window, and honestly it was meh.
If any of the actors were paid based on sales of the film, I’d sue.
The Black Widow movie just wasn’t very good either. I saw it and was disappointed.