After a pair of G.I. Joe movies which, it must be said, didn't really live up to their promise, the upcoming Snake Eyes movie had a lot of people very excited. The movie would focus on the character who is probably the most popular, and unique, in the franchise, and it was set to star the great Henry Golding in the title role. Everything was looking like Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins, was maybe going to be the movie fans had been waiting for. It still may be, but we'll have to wait longer to know, because the movie has now been pushed back into 2021.
On a recent earnings call (via THR) Hasbro confirmed that Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins, previously set for an October 2020 release, was being pushed back to an as yet undecided date in 2021. Details are still being worked out with Paramount who is distributing the film.
While seeing movies delayed is par for the course these days, the Snake Eyes delay is actually a bit surprising. The movie was set for October already, and while it's anybody's guess what the state of theaters will be in October right now, other films are certainly planning at this point to release then. And Snake Eyes is in post-production which largely consists of jobs that can still be done even while massive productions are shut down. It's a lot of digital effects and other work that can be done at computers.
And Snake Eyes wasn't delayed to give its release date to some other film that had to be pushed back, which is the other reason that we're seeing release dates shuffle around. And considering the fact that Paramount has had to push other films like Top Gun: Maverick and A Quiet Place Part II into 2021 you'd think the studio would want to put something on the books this year. It's possible that for whatever reason Snake Eyes just won't be done by August due to the massive delays and so it had to be done. Or it could simply be the feeling that, even if theaters are open, attendance might be so low that movies that are released could end up failing through no fault of their own.
This latter item might be the bigger issue. At this point, it seems unlikely theaters will be open before late August or early September. And while there will certainly be those willing to go back to the theater immediately, one thing that reopenings have shown us is that a lot of people still aren't comfortable going where there are crowds. It will likely be months or years before theaters see the crowds they're used to seeing, so the box office will continue to suffer. It's going to be a long time before any movie has a chance to be as big as those that came out before the shutdown.
