James Bond made a grand exit earlier today when Daniel Craig’s final outing as 007 in the highly-anticipated No Time To Die was shaken over to next spring. But since Universal's release date shift for Bond pitted the action flick against another massive title from the studio, F9, it was only a matter of time for the next Fast & the Furious movie to get a new release date.
Instead of F9 hitting theaters on April 2, 2021, No Time To Die will take its place, and the high-octane blockbuster will instead arrive later in the summer, on May 28, 2021, per Universal. This delay comes months after F9 became one of the first major releases to move itself over to 2021. F9 was originally going to be a 2020 summer blockbuster alongside titles like Black Widow, Wonder Woman 1984 and Tenet.
This places Universal’s major releases in mirrors of slots they were initially set to be this year. The studio had No Time To Die set for early April and F9 coming on May 22 before COVID-19 concerns created these delays. As the 2021 movie calendar indicates during the time of this article’s publication, F9 will go head-to-head with Emma Stone’s Cruella and Antoine Fuqua’s science fiction thriller Infinite during the last weekend of May.
A new wave of theatrical shifts out of November was kicked off by Disney last week when the studio extracted Black Widow out of the first weekend of the month and moved it to May 7, 2021 (also mirroring its once summer 2020 date). Disney also moved Death on the Nile down from October to December, placing it a week away from Wonder Woman 1984, which now holds a Christmas Day release.
Over this past summer, Paramount decided to bite the bullet and move Top Gun: Maverick from December to July 2, 2021, and finally movied John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place: Part II to April 23, 2021. Things are looking more and more like how the studios envisioned its biggest movies to come out in 2020 everyday! At least when it comes to F9, we’re not getting as dramatic of a shift as we did in March when the studio delayed it an entire year.
F9 will now come four years after the last central Fast & Furious movie, The Fate of the Furious, following a brief detour into spinoff territory last summer with Hobbs & Shaw. Check out the trailer for the summer 2021 release below:
F9 will see the return of Vin Diesel, Jordana Brewster, Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, Charlize Theron, Helen Mirren, Nathalie Emmanuel, along with fan-favorites Sung Kang and Tokyo Drift’s Lucas Black. John Cena will also join the franchise as Dom’s brother Jakob, Michael Rooker will play a new character named Buddy, and Cardi B also has a role.
Check out what’s in store for the rest of 2020 with CinemaBlend’s release calendar while we wait for F9 on May 28, 2021.
