Mark September 23 as the date when Hollywood unofficially gave up the ghost on getting patrons back to movie theaters in 2020. On Wednesday, Disney announced a number of significant release date changes, including the long-expected delays of Black Widow and Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story.
Originally set for release on November 6, Marvel’s Natasha Romanoff solo film, starring Scarlett Johansson in the title role, will now arrive in theaters on May 7, 2021. That shift forced a couple of other Marvel titles to move as well. Eternals, Chloe Zhao’s highly anticipated superhero film, shifted from February 12, 2021 to November 5, 2021. Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings moved from May 7, 2021 to July 9, 2021. (Previously, Disney had already delayed Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness and Thor: Love and Thunder from 2021 to 2022.)
Elsewhere on the calendar, the West Side Story remake, which had been penciled in as a heavy Oscars contender, moved from December 18 to December 10, 2021. Another potential awards favorite, the 20th Century Studios film Deep Water starring real-life couple Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas, was also bumped from November 13 to August 13, 2021.
Disney also pushed the release of Death on the Nile from October 23 to December 18, where the Agatha Christie adaptation will join Warner Bros. release Dune and the Paramount sequel Coming 2 America in theaters. In addition to those films, the only other remaining blockbusters on the calendar for 2020 include the James Bond movie No Time to Die, as well as Pixar’s Soul on November 20 and Wonder Woman 1984 on December 25. (Disney announced nothing about Soul on Wednesday, but it has been speculated that the studio might shift the film’s release to Disney+, in a fashion similar to how it handled Mulan.)
Notably, Disney announced no further release date changes for either Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch (October 16) or Zhao’s critically acclaimed festival favorite Nomadland (December 4). Both of those films will supposedly receive a release from Searchlight Pictures this year.
Movie theaters around the country began opening last month, but it has not been a smooth transition. Major venues in New York and Los Angeles remain closed, and the coronavirus pandemic has largely kept audiences away. Thus far, Christopher Nolan’s Tenet is the only movie that has attempted to weather the storm: The film has earned a tepid $36 million in North America through three weeks, for a worldwide total of $250 million.
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