Well, I guess we know the outcome of Disney’s “let’s release Mulan to Disney+ for a premium price” experiment now. The House of Mouse has shuffled nearly their entire release slate with most major tentpole films headed into 2021.
According to Variety, Black Widow will now be released to theatres on May 7th 2021, which is a full year after its original release date in May of this year. This has caused a bit of a cascade for the MCU films with Eternals being pushed from February to November 2021, Shang-Chi moving from May to July
Death on the Nile is still technically scheduled for this year but has moved back all the way to December 18th, nearly two months later than its original October 23rd date.
West Side Story has been pushed an entire year from December 18th this year to December 20th 2021. I guess Spielberg’s first musical will have to be a big awards contender in 2022.
Interestingly the forthcoming Pixar film, Soul is still slated for November 20th. With Pixar films being huge moneymakers as well, I would have thought they’d move it as well.
Disney did experiment with releasing Mulan straight to Disney+ this month but that must not have had the financial impact they wanted. Combined with Christopher Nolan’s Tenet performing well under expectations –to put it mildly– after premiering in theatres this month, it’s hard to fault them from a business perspective. Still, from a “human lives are more important” perspective I wish they hadn’t tried to release that film in theatres at all yet.
All of this news would suck for film lovers under normal circumstances but there is still a worldwide pandemic happening and the US is handling it poorly. My stance of Don’t Go To the Movies Right Now is still in place as well. There are places that are handling the pandemic well, but if I don’t feel safe here in BC I can’t imagine what it must feel like in America right now.
Still, while most big theatre chains will survive, I shudder to think what the movie-going landscape is going to look like in 2022, and I hate that this is probably going to impact basically every independent theatre (if it hasn’t already).
It’s super weird to be living through such a bleak point in history.