To nobody's surprise, production houses have officially postponed the release of a slew of big-budget movies that were scheduled to hit theaters earlier this year.
The sequel to A Quiet Place, starring real-life couple John Krasinski and Emily Blunt, will no longer drop this September. The film will, as of now, be released in theaters on April 23, 2021 instead. The follow up to the 1986 Top Gun starring Tom Cruise, Top Gun: Maverick has also been pushed back six months, from this December to July 2 of next year.
As previously noted, the much anticipated Christopher Nolan film Tenet has actually been taken off the release slate entirely. Originally intended for a July debut that had to be postponed a few times, the movie is now in limbo, awaiting a new release date by Warner Brothers. Disney's Mulan is receiving a similar treatment: initially scheduled to drop in March, the effort has undergone four delays until this week, when the studio pulled it from its calendar entirely.
"Over the last few months, it’s become clear that nothing can be set in stone when it comes to how we release films during this global health crisis, and today that means pausing our release plans for Mulan as we assess how we can most effectively bring this film to audiences around the world," said a Disney spokesperson in an official statement.
As noted by the spokesperson, the decisions taken throughout the industry are highly dependent on a volatile environment marked by the uncertainty surrounding a global epidemic that hasn't shown promising signs of slowing down just yet.
As a result, as cinemas around the world remain shuttered and audiences can't be reached in traditional ways, production houses have experimented with straight-to-video releases, mostly involving low- and medium-budget films. Will the practice hold up when applied to epic productions the likes of Tenet? We'll have to wait and see.