Disney and Warner Bros. Are Playing Chicken With the Summer Movie Calendar

One of my favorite filmmakers is Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight Trilogy, Inception, Dunkirk) so I’ve been looking forward to his new release this summer. Warner Bros. recently announced that Tenet would move from its original July 17 date to July 31.

What’s the point of moving a release by only two weeks? Because until that move, Tenet was the industry’s canary, the first big film to be released in theaters during the pandemic. Hollywood desperately wants to understand moviegoers’ appetite before they start debuting films that would likely gross $1 billion otherwise.

Now Disney’s live action Mulan is the first blockbuster on the calendar on July 24. I’m guessing that Disney will not want to take a chance on Mulan bombing because no one wants to go to theaters (both Aladdin and The Lion King topped $1B last year) and will move it to a later date, and Warner Bros. will in turn further delay Tenet.

Many films that were originally scheduled to bow by now have been released digitally with some success, but no one has yet tried this with a film with a $200 million budget. Also, Christopher Nolan is a major proponent of the theater experience and continues to shoot with film stock in defiance of the rest of the industry’s embrace of digital photography, so he would be horrified to have one of his movies forgo a theatrical run.

When will we see big movies in theaters again? Personally, while I’m as anxious as anyone to see a big, expensive movie in the theater again, I’m not yet ready to put my own health and the health of my family at risk to do so. Spending hours with strangers in an a room where air conditioning is recirculating the atmosphere is exactly the type of environment experts are telling us to avoid. Yes we can all spread far apart, but then there won’t be enough revenue per showing to justify the release.

So when will we be able to finally watch Tenet, Mulan and Wonder Woman 1984? My guess is that after spending 2020 playing chicken with their blockbusters, the studios will keep swerving until the public is sufficiently vaccinated sometime in 2021.

Will 2021 be an especially crowded movie calendar with so many of 2020’s releases getting pushed into next year? No, because production has been shut down on a number of productions that are scheduled for 2021 and 2022, so my hope is that when life gets back to normal the release calendar will have been shuffled around such that we have a steady stream of new movies, but that is just my uninformed speculation.

In the meantime there has never been a better time to see some of the great movies you’ve missed from the comfort of your own home. But skip Gone With the Wind, that shit is racist.