When will things start to feel normal again? Even experts are cautious about putting a firm date on the end of self-isolation, frequently warning it may be less of an exact end date and more of a slow loosening of guidelines. But Hollywood has to keep the conveyer belt rolling one way or the other and on Friday, announced a bunch of new release dates for many delayed movies.
Mulan will now open July 24, which signals a lot of confidence on Disney’s part that the guidelines will be lifted and people will feel comfortable sitting in large groups of strangers again by mid-summer. Fox’s Ryan Reynolds-vehicle Free Guy, meanwhile, got bumped back all the way December 11 and Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt’s Jungle Cruise got pushed back a whole year, to July 30 2021. Disney has also bumped its fifth (and final?) Indiana Jones movie to July of 2022.
Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch was originally slated to land in July, but will now arrive on October 16. New Mutants, which has been delayed at least four times even before the pandemic, has yet to receive a new release date.
Marvel Studios had the chore of moving its entire cinematic operation back. To do that, Black Widow moved to November 6 — the day that originally belonged to 2020’s other Marvel offering, The Eternals. That movie will not open on February 16 of 2021. That date was originally slotted for Shang-Chi: The Legend of the Ten Rings, which will now open in May of 2021 …and so on and so forth. The nice thing about having your movies scheduled three to four years in the future is that bumping them becomes a little more straightforward.
One casualty of all this? Disney’s Artemis Fowl isn’t going to see theatrical release at all and instead will head straight to Disney Plus. Disney had cut down the window between theatrical release and home streaming for movies like Onward and Frozen 2, so it’ll be interesting to see if other movie studios decide to cut their losses and utilize streaming service-first release or not.
