While movies being delayed certainly wasn’t uncommon before 2020, this year will go down in the film history books that the cinematic calendar was turned on its head several times over! The features that didn’t shift to being PVOD or streaming offerings had to find new release dates, and plenty from that group have had to repeat the process. Candyman is among them, and word’s come in that the horror flick won’t come out this year.
Going into 2020, the plan was for Candyman to hit theaters on June 12, but following the current health crisis, it was pushed to September 25, and again to October 16. Candyman would unquestionably made for a fitting Halloween theatrical experience, but today, Universal Pictures and MGM announced that it’s pushing the movie to some time in 2021.
Various movie theaters in the United States have reopened their doors over the past several weeks, allowing for The New Mutants, Tenet and a scattering of other features to be seen on the big screen. That said, with the health crisis still raging, there are plenty of multiplexes that remain closed, and as such, Universal and MGM decided to postpone Candyman again. So we’ll just have to wait and see what the 2021 release date ends up being.
This is the second major film delay that’s been announced today. Like Candyman, Warner Bros and DC’s Wonder Woman 1984 was previously slated to come out in October, but now it will arrive on December 25. This likely means that fellow WB release Dune, which dropped its first trailer earlier this week and is slotted to come out a week earlier, will follow in Candyman’s footsteps and be moved to 2021.
Rather than being a full-blown reboot of the Candyman property, the new Candyman movie is a direct sequel to the 1992 same-named original, which was met largely positive reception and made close to $26 million domestically off a budget around $8-9 million. This also marks the second Candyman movie to get a theatrical release, with both 1995’s Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh and 1999’s Candyman: Day of the Dead going straight to video.
The new Candyman will take audiences back to Chicago’s Cabrini Green neighborhood, which has become gentrified beyond recognition since the events of the first movie. Yahya Abdul Mateen II and Teyonah Parris star as artist Anthony McCoy and galley director Brianna Cartwight, respectively, a couple who move into the neighborhood, with Anthony unwittingly unleashing a terrifyingly viral wave of violence after learning about the Candyman legend and desperately trying to maintain his status in the Chicago art world by using the details of these grisly murders for his paintings.
The sequel also sees Tony Good reprising Candyman himself (whose real name is Daniel Robitaille) and Vanessa Estelle Williams reprising Anne-Marie McCoy, Anthony’s mother who appeared in the first movie. Behind the cameras, Nia DaCosta (who was recently hired for Captain Marvel 2) directed Candyman and cowrote the script with producers Jordan Peele and Win Rosenfeld.
Keep checking back with CinemaBlend for more news concerning Candyman, and be sure to learn what other movies are supposed to arrive in the near future with our 2020 release schedule and 2021 release schedule.
