Disney pulled a major shake-up of its release calendar this week and it delayed a lot of movies, including basically every Marvel and Star Wars project currently on the books. All the Avatar films have been pushed back. Only Deadpool 3 has good news, as that project actually got moved up.
Any fan of any of these franchises is sure to be bummed out, but there’s an important thing to keep in mind, which is that there’s a halfway decent chance that a lot of these “delays” were destined to happen. Sometimes Disney, and every other studio, will set a release date for a film when even they know that it’s not actually going to come out on that date.
Even if we discount the last three years where every movie saw a production delay, release date pushed back, or both, due to an unprecedented global pandemic, the fact is that until a movie is actually filming there are still any number of things that can derail a project. Even after filming begins that can happen, though it becomes less likely.
Right now every studio has release dates planned years in advance. In the case of the upcoming Disney movies, those films often have specific titles, but sometimes they’re just set as Untitled Disney Movie or Untitled Marvel Movie, and it’s unclear if the studio itself even knows what movie they think might come out there.
But even when a specific film is given a specific date, that doesn’t mean anybody actually expects that movie to come out on that date. A number of years ago I flew to New Zealand to visit the set of the live-action Mulan and I asked producer Jason Reed why that film had been delayed from its initial date, and he admitted, it was never really expected to come out then, saying....
The previous release date, if I’m totally honest, was sort of a place holder anyways, and was in some ways intended to scare off that wanted to make another movie [for that date]. When we actually ran the real schedule for how we would actually reach that date that they originally put in, which was March of 2019, what we would have had to do to get that date would have compromised the movie.
As it happens, the original Mulan release date had been even earlier, in November of 2018, so the odds of it ever hitting that date were just short of impossible. Hitting the date wasn’t what mattered. A Disney movie did release on that date, it just wasn’t Mulan. On that date, we got the largely forgotten Nutcracker and the Four Realms. Mulan ended up getting set for a March 2020 release, which it would have hit, had it not been for the previously mentioned pandemic pushing things back.
So keep that in mind that not only were some of the old release dates probably never meant to be, some of these new release dates may fall into the same category. The good news is that a delay doesn’t mean that something terrible has befallen that upcoming movie you’re excited about. But don't expect that things won't change from here on out. They almost certainly will.
