Editorial Staff
With coronavirus still causing more trouble than a baby bear on a busy highway, don’t expect visits to the theaters to be something we all do in July- maybe not even August.
With numbers increasing by the day in the U.S, and thus, more and more films being pushed back, theaters are keeping their doors shut a little longer. In the past few days, everything from “Tenet” (now August 12), “Mulan” (August 21), “Unhinged” (July 31) and “Bill and Ted Face the Music” (August 21) has had their release dates pushed by at least a few weeks. As a result, chains like AMC have delayed their opening until the end of July.
Last week, Paramount’s film adaptation of Tom Clancy’s “Without Remorse” was pushed from September 18, 2020 to February 26, 2021. And today, rom-com “The Broken Heart’s Gallery” was pushed from July 17 to August 7.
Christopher Nolan’s highly-anticipated “Tenet” had originally been set for a July 17 release before being pushed to July 31. It’ll now open two weeks later than that.
“Warner Bros. is committed to bringing Tenet to audiences in theaters, on the big screen, when exhibitors are ready and public health officials say it’s time,” the studio announced in a statement Thursday. “In this moment what we need to be is flexible, and we are not treating this as a traditional movie release. We are choosing to open the movie mid-week to allow audiences to discover the film in their own time, and we plan to play longer, over an extended play period far beyond the norm, to develop a very different yet successful release strategy.
In Australia, where coronavirus is under slightly more control (but numbers are on the rise again), theaters are expected to re-open next week. Since most new releases, as per above, won’t be available until July, at the earliest, chains like Village and Hoyts will be following the lead of local drive-in theaters who have been showing a mixture of old and recent film product – with recent offerings like “Sonic the Hedgehog” and “Bloodshot” programmed alongside classic fare like “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”, “Ghostbusters”, “The Goonies” and “Reservoir Dogs”.
