Now Hollywood is delaying even summer movies into next year

Over the last month or so, we’ve watched as Hollywood has cancelled or postponed the release dates of major movies, shut down production on our favorite TV shows, and generally come to a standstill as the coronavirus continues to sweep over the world. After all, what’s the point of releasing a new movie into theaters when all the theaters are closed? And with the federal government recently extending social distancing guidelines through the end of April, I think it’s sinking in that this crisis isn’t going to be over anytime soon.

At first, only movies coming out in the near future were affected. A Quiet Place Part II was scheduled to hit theaters on March 18, but obviously that wasn’t going to happen. It’s not coming out on March 8 of 2021. No Time To Die, the new James Bond film, had its release date delayed from April to November. Fast and Furious 9 was going to be released on May 22; now it’s scheduled for April of next year.

But how late into the year were people going to delay their movies? Alarm bells went off when Warner Bros. delayed the release of Wonder Woman 1984 from June 5 to August 14. Now, Sony has delayed two of its major summer releases —  Ghostbusters: Afterlife, which was going to come out on July 10; and the Spider-Man villain film Morbius, which was due out July 31 — into next year. They’re now coming out on March 5 and 19 of 2021 respectively.

Now, I am not — I really can’t stress this enough — not an expect on infectious diseases, but the conventional wisdom is that the threat from the coronavirus will probably lessen in the summer months, when the heat burns it away, and yet movie studios still feel the need to bump their big summer releases back. That is probably prudent, since experts aren’t in agreement about what’s going to happen in the summer, and there’s a good chance the virus could come back in the fall when temperatures fall, anyway. The upshot is that it probably won’t be safe to go to theaters for a while, and I’m glad studios are keeping that in mind, even if I want to see Wonder Woman 1984 now, consarnit.

Maybe something will change once we know more about how the coronavirus behaves or we can say with confidence that we have cases under control — as I’m sure you know, the info on these points seems to change by the hour. But it’s looking like 2020 will be pretty bare for major movie releases. 2021 will be interesting as well, because studios will have to move things around to make room for all these delays. For example, an “untitled Sony-Marvel pic” has already been bumped from its release date of March 5, 2021. It’s now listed as “TBD.” There’s probably gonna be a lot of that.

But movies’ loss is television’s gain. Lots of people are taking in a lot of TV these days as they self-isolate, and streaming services like Netflix are determined to keep the content coming. It just announced that its renewed its animated gorefest Castlevania for a fourth season…

…and its supernatural family drama Locke & Key for a second:

Now if people could only gather to shoot and animated those shows…

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h/t The A.V. Club