Oy. The hits just keep coming for the American theater industry.
It is being reported that Disney is eyeing a possible delay for Marvel’s Black Widow. It wouldn’t be the first time the studio moved the Scarlett Johansson action pic. The movie was originally supposed to open in May, before COVID-19 disrupted the world. It was then shuffled over to November but now Disney is toying with pushing it back again, to a date unknown.
That’s not all: Variety also says Disney is thinking of possibly moving Pixar’s Soul from a theatrical release to one on Disney+, similar to what they did with Hamilton, Artemis Fowl and, to much fanfare, Mulan. Now, if Disney did transport Soul from the big screen to its massively successful streaming service, we don’t know if it’ll follow the Mulan release model. Fans hoping to watch Mulan on Disney+ were required to pay an additional fee of $30 to gain access to the movie, though it’ll be free to all Disney+ users come December. A movie like Soul is similar to Mulan in that it was going to be a hopefully huge financial success for the studio so they may be inclined to charge Disney+ subscribers a fee again to turn some sort of profit. At the time, they said they didn’t except to charge for Disney+ movies after Mulan but, hey, you never know.
The possible move of Black Widow and Soul just prove that simply because theaters in the US are (slowly) re-opening doesn’t mean things are anywhere near normal. Now that we’ve seen Tenet’s real numbers, we know that people aren’t flocking to theaters yet. Many had hoped that the arrival of Christopher Nolan’s film would mark the return of the movie-going experience in America but that’s not the case. A lot of theaters aren’t open yet and those that are aren’t being flooded with customers. The road to recovery for theaters is going to be very, very long.
A slew of other films — including Wonder Woman 1984, Candyman and Greenland — have been pushed back even though theaters are beginning to open their doors again. That’s because studios are starting to see that people aren’t heading back to the movies just yet, no matter what their local ordinances say. That means the immediate future of cinema is murky and that’s a scary thought. It’s also an exhausting thought; it feels like this will never end and normalcy is constantly so far away.