With each passing day, it feels like we are getting further and further from new movies opening in theaters. In a normal society, we’d have been ramping up anticipation for No Time to Die or the latest Marvel Studios effort, Black Widow. Instead, we hear of the latest delays, including Morbius, Uncharted and Jason Reitman’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife.
The last one, in particular, his the fanbase hardest when the news broke that the summer blockbuster no longer was aiming for a summer release. Sony Pictures revealed that it was pushing Ghostbusters: Afterlife from July of this year to March 5, 2021. And social media flooded with disappointed Tweets.
That’s also how all of us will look and feel after the quarantines are over.
Damn, that’s a backhanded complaint, isn’t it? This person legitimately was sad, though.
Whereas, Irma kind of captures where all of us stand with regards to the movie’s delay.
Such is the new reality in this tenuous Hollywood landscape. No studio honestly knows when movie theaters will be able to open up and be back to running at full steam. So they play release-date roulette and aim for a target in the future, hoping that sometime between now and then, the current coronavirus epidemic subsides, and society figures out how to flatten that curve.
There were optimistic signs when China opened up some of its movie theaters… only, they country closed them relatively quickly, perhaps in fear of a second wave of the virus coming through.
There’s so much in life to worry about, and the state of a new movie opening (and when it might open) ranks low. But the shift for a movie like Ghostbusters: Afterlife – and all of the major blockbusters – raises an interesting conversation, at the very least, about how the studios will handle the release schedule when things do return to normal. And they will return to normal.
Will there be a massive vacuum of content that needs to be filled? Will a handful of massive, delayed movies suddenly move up? Which movie will be brave enough to lead the charge, and possibly deal with a trickle of cautious crowds making their way back to the multiplex? It will be fascinating to see play out, once we finally reach that anticipated point.
