While Hollywood's attempts to figure out when and how to release movies has been the biggest story coming out of the insanity of the global pandemic, a close second has been the difficulty involved in getting all the movies in production back in front of cameras. Several major films had to shut down in the middle of filming, and one of those is the highly anticipated Netflix movie, Red Notice which stars Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds, and Gal Gadot.
With a cast like that you can be sure this a movie that people want to see, and because it's Netflix, it's not even dependant on the theatrical situation. However, it still needs to be able to get back in front of cameras and finish filming. Now Dwayne Johnson revealed in a new Instagram video that there's a tentative re-start date for Red Notice in mid-September. Check out The Rock's full announcement below.
It seems the plan is for the cast and crew of Red Notice to enter a quarantine bubble much like what the NBA is doing at Walt Disney World in order to still have a basketball season. NBA games just started up but the players have essentially been in lockdown at the resort for the last month to make sure everybody is healthy before games got underway. For the most part, the bubble appears to have been working, so it's the best available blueprint for how to do this.
In fact, Dwayne Johnson says there has been direct communication between the Netflix crew and the NBA to learn the best practices for doing something like this, and Red Notice will also be able to learn from the mistakes the NBA made. As Johnson says, this is something we're all learning about which makes it incredibly difficult. Nobody knows what they're doing, everybody is just doing the best they can with the best information available. This is the case if you're working on a film set, running a sports league, or just trying to spend eight hours a day in an office environment. According to Johnson...
The tricky thing about this is whether you’re in production of movies like I do. Or sports like the NBA. Or any job that you guys have all around the world. The tricky thing is this is all new. There’s no real historical data and research, facts and data that we can glean information from. There’s no blueprint here. We’re in a beta phase every step of the way so it's very challenging. But I’m very confident the bubble we’re going to create, the quarantining, the sequestering, the multiple layers of health and safety practice and new measures that we’re going to be implementing. Extremely aggressive by the way, which you have to be.
If production is set to begin in mid-September, then odds are the cast and crew will be going into the bubble to later than the end of August. This will give them time to make sure everybody is healthy before actually going to work. A lot of film productions may be planning similar things to make sure they can go forward without people getting sick.
