In the chaos of the US election week, the fact that COVID numbers continue to dangerously spike has largely been overlooked, but with those numbers (a record 125,000 cases in just one single day this week) staying so dangerously high, there seems less and less chance that the dreams of reopening America’s multiplexes in time for next month and Christmas is going to happen. With several countries in Europe also going back into a ‘lockdown’ phase and closing all non-essential businesses, there are simply very few screens to show movies. Even the few that are open would be insufficient to make a release viable in most cases.
Wonder Woman 1984 technically still remains on its 25th December schedule but no-one now believes that’s likely to stick. Almost all major releases are now off the 2020 schedule and planned for 2021, with further options to change again if necessary. (Only Universal seems to be sticking its neck out so far and the CGI Croods movie and Tom Hanks’ The News of the World – both scheduled for December- are not really tentpole releases).
In that regard, Disney has now pulled both Free Guy (the Ryan Reynolds as a sentient computer game avatar) and Death on the Nile (the latest Agatha Christie adaptation, once again starring Kenneth Branagh as Poirot) from 11th December and 18th December respectively.
Neither is being given a new release date as yet.
