If you're a fan looking forward to the new reboot of the Charlie's Angels franchise from Elizabeth Banks, there's some bad news. You're going to have to wait a bit longer to see it. On the plus side, the film's new release date greatly improves its box office chances, making the possibility that we could see a new franchise born here that much greater. And you won't have to wait too much longer. The film, originally set for a November 1 bow, will now arrive on November 15 instead.
The movie release calendar is basically a just a bunch of dominoes, and when one falls, the rest follow suit. That's what happened last year when Warner Bros. made the decision to push Wonder Woman 1984 from it's November 1 date to the summer of 2020. When that happened, two big movies jumped into that space. The first was Charlie's Angels moving into the same weekend where the Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore, Lucy Liu, version of the franchise had released, the second was the new Terminator movie, which we now know to be called Terminator: Dark Fate.
This set up an unlikely showdown, where two major tentpole releases were going to hit the same weekend. However, that showdown is now cancelled as Charlie Angel's has now jumped back two more weekends to mid-November.
The reason for the switch is two-fold. First, as with Wonder Woman 1984, the weekend just opened up, following Kingsman spinoff The Great Game leaving that date for February 2020. The other reason apparently has less to do with competing with Terminator domestically, but perhaps more with doing so internationally. Deadline says that the studio thinks the new Charlie's Angels has strong international potential and so the new release date will help with that.
The previous Terminator film wasn't a massive hit in North America, but it did much better overseas, especially in China, so it could be that Angels wants to avoid doing battle in those markets as much as possible.
While Charlie's Angels and Terminator aren't necessarily a pair of franchises that are drawing largely from the same audience, it's still nice that they'll both be given some breathing room. Fewer fans will now need to choose between them and both will be given a chance to succeed or fail on their own merits rather than simply losing business because the other film siphoned some away.
At the same time, it's been so long since we've seen a couple of major films actually go up against each at the box office on opening weekend, it would have been interesting to see who came out on top. Terminator is certainly the more established franchise, but with the success that many female centered films have had in recent years, one certainly wonders if Charlie's Angels might have shocked everybody.
Of course, to get an idea, we'll have to actually get a look at the film. We're still waiting on a trailer.
