Hollywood has decided tonight’s the night to shove back their slate of films — including James Bond’s latest outing No Time To Die, the Uncharted movie, and Ghostbusters: Afterlife. No Time to Die now has a release date of October 8th, Ghostbusters will be pushed back five months to November 11th, and Uncharted now won’t arrive until 2022, Exhibitor Relations reports.
Bond was the big film whose third delay was enough to force theater chains Regal and Cineworld to close all their US and UK locations. It was originally slated for April 2020, then got pushed back to November 2020 and now to April 2021. If you’re counting, this news marks the fourth delay. Instead of releasing the movie on streaming, as other studios have been doing, MGM seems adamant on premiering the movie in theaters — but by the time it’s safe to do so, there may not be as many of them.
AMC has warned investors that it’s about to run out of money, and other theaters also might not survive past the middle of 2021. So the Bond franchise moving to the end of the year is not a good sign.
We can probably expect even more films to be delayed as delay piles on top of delay, since only a certain number of films can successfully premiere at physical theaters in any given span of time.
Big ones we’re waiting on right now:
-F9
-Black Widow
-Minions: Rise of Gru
-Top Gun: Maverick
-Shang-Chi
Not as big, but:
-Cruella
-Free Guy
— julia alexander (@loudmouthjulia) January 22, 2021
We haven’t heard from Disney yet, but you can also add delays for Edgar Wright’s Last Night In Soho! (now October 22nd) and Sony’s Cinderella (now July 16th) to the pile.
