With movie theaters closed down a number of films have missed their release dates. This has started a domino effect where the delayed films take new release dates, forcing the movies already in those slots to fall back to another new date. Also, with productions of basically every movie that was being made on hold, many films were going to need to push themselves back because they'll no longer be ready to go by the original date. Most of these movies are casualties of the wider coronavirus outbreak, but in the case of Tom Hanks' new film, it was directly impacted by the virus, because he got it.
Tom Hanks and his wife Rita Wilson were in Australia to film a new biopic about the life of Elvis Presley when the Oscar winner was diagnosed with coronavirus. And so, it's little surprise that the movie he was there to make has officially been delayed, though not by much. Originally set to open in October of 2021, it will now open November 5, 2021.
In the grand scheme of things this delay is only a minor one. Other movies, like F9 and Jungle Cruise have been pushed back by a full year. While the Elvis Presley movie is being directed by Baz Luhrmann, and thus probably has a lot of flash and spectacle to it, it probably won't require an extensive period of post-production the way your average superhero movie does. In fact, it looks like it's actually because of a superhero movie that the delay is happening at all.
Matt Reeves' The Batman, which was originally going to come out in June of 2021, has now taken the October 1, date that the Elvis movie had. The production of both movies will likely be delayed by approximately the same amount of time, whatever that ends up being, but The Batman will have more moving parts and may be more affected by the delay. The Elvis movie will likely still be ready to go by October 2021, but it just needed to make room for the bat.
So far, just about every movie that had an announced release date has had to shift it either due to its own delay or as a response to another film's delay. It will be sometime in 2023 before we stop seeing direct effects of this delay on the release calendar,
At this point, the Hollywood schedule is working on the assumption that things will be back to what will pass for normal by mid-July. That still seems achievable right now, but the closer we get to that date the more we'll still need to reevaluate. We really don't know when movies will be back on schedule, and so the possibility of another round of delays is still very much real.
