Ever since the World Health Organization first warned about the global COVID-19 pandemic, studios have been reshuffling their release and production schedules. Now, with most movie theaters still closed in the USA, studios continue to postpone their blockbuster movies, aware there’s no chance of them returning their production budgets at the box office. Initially, studios pushed their upcoming titles to autumn of 2020, then to mid-2021, and now, increasingly, to autumn of 2021 and even spring of 2022.
MGM and Universal Pictures slated the latest James Bond movie No Time to Die for a release in November 2019. In one of the most unfortunate rescheduling decisions in recent history, No Time to Die was postponed until April 2020… Just in time for the first wave of the pandemic. Since then, studios changed the release date several times. The twenty-fifth James Bond film is currently to come out on October 8, 2021. Universal also rescheduled the release of Edgar Wright’s horror movie Last Night in Soho from April 23 to October 8, 2021.
Another early cinematic casualty of the pandemic was John Krasinski‘s sci-fi horror A Quiet Place Part II. A sequel to a 2018 surprise box office hit, it officially premiered in March 2020. The movie still hasn’t come out. Last week, Paramount decided to postpone its release until September 17, 2021.
And then there’s Sony. The studio pushed Ghostbusters: Afterlife from its original release date in June 2020 to March 2021 and now, once again, to November 11, 2021. Sony postponed other titles as well, including Morbius (from October 8, 2021, to January 21, 2022), Uncharted (from July 16, 2021, to February 2022), Cinderella (from February 5th to Last NightJuly 16th, 2021), and Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway (June 11th, 2021).
