The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is officially delayed on Disney+
By Dan Selcke
Disney has released its schedule of new movies and TV shows coming to Disney+ this August. There’s some good stuff on there, including the original X-Men movie, Ant-Man and the Wasp and the 2017 remake of Beauty and the Beast. But what’s nowhere to be seen is The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, the first of the studio’s high-profile Marvel Cinematic Universe shows.
And that’s not too surprising. Production on the show, which follows Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) and Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) in the wake of the events of Avengers: Endgame had to shut down due to the coronavirus. Although it started back up eventually, apparently it wasn’t in time to get the series out in time for August.
Disney is working on other Marvel shows, like WandaVision and Loki. The studio was also teasing that the former could be out this year, but with this news, you wonder if it too won’t be pushed back. We were always gonna get to a point where the coronavirus started delaying new shows, and it looks like that point has arrived.
As long as the second season of The Mandalorian comes out this year, I’ll be happy; so far as I can tell, most of all of that was shot before the pandemic started shutting everything down, so it should hopefully be alright. It’s scheduled for October, but I’d take November. There’s no new release date for The Falcon and the Winter Soldier set as of yet.
As long as we’re talking about Marvel’s misfortunes, did you know that US attorney general William Barr called them out in a speech yesterday for censoring their movies in order to appease China, which is the world’s second-largest film market? “Hollywood now regularly censors its own movies to appease the Chinese Communist Party, the world’s most powerful violator of human rights,” he said. “This censorship infects not only versions of movies that are released in China, but also many that are shown in American theaters to American audiences.”
As an example, Barr pointed to Disney’s decision to rethink the character of the Ancient One, played by Tilda Swinton in Doctor Strange and Avengers: Endgame. In the comics, this character is Tibetan, but because Tibet is a hot-button issue for China, she was made Celtic for the movie. The Doctor Strange writer admitted this was done to avoid angering China, since if they do, it’s possible the country won’t allow the film into Chinese theaters.
It’s no secret that China is a huge deal for movie studios, and it’s true that lots of them clip and edit their films for that market, or even alter them at the outset like Doctor Strange. “Chinese government censors don’t need to say a word, because Hollywood is doing their work for them,” Barr claimed. Whether the US government wants to crack down on that sort of thing remains to be seen.
Next. Cursed, Episode 1 Review: Netflix’s Arthurian drama has likable leads and deft writing. dark
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