As theaters stay shuttered with no clear timeline for reopening, almost every huge movie on the release calendar has been delayed. Today, Disney announced a shift to basically its entire Phase 4 rollout and also gave a new theatrical date to Mulan. These debuts are scheduled years in advance, which means moving one results in the dominoes falling for whatever else is planned.
So, here is where the next wave of Marvel supers stands as of April 3: Black Widow got pulled from its May 11 date and was in limbo for a few weeks until getting a new release day of November 6. That means Marvel’s other intended drop for that same weekend, The Eternals, has been bumped to February 12, 2021. That, however, is when Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings was supposed to come out, so now its moving to May 7, 2021 — the intended release date for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. With Doctor Strange 2 being pushed to November 5, 2021, it results in Thor: Love and Thunder moving from that fall date to a new one on February 28, 2022. Captain Marvel 2 will also be shifting, but will actually arrive two weeks earlier than intended from July 29, 2022, to July 8, 2022.
Besides the comic-book fare, Disney has also redated Mulan, which was meant to be released on March 27, but will now come out on July 24. Additionally, the studio is delaying the release of its untitled next Indiana Jones movie an entire year from July 9, 2021, to July 29, 2022. The same strategy is being applied to Jungle Cruise, which was slated for July 24 but will now debut on July 30, 2021. Meanwhile, Artemis Fowl will skip theaters entirely — it was supposed to land on May 29 — and will now launch on Disney+ at a date to be determined. Disney-owned Fox properties will of course be affected, too. The French Dispatch, a Searchlight picture, will go from summer to fall, moving from July 24 to October 16, and the 20th Century big-budget Ryan Reynolds movie Free Guy is now a Christmas release, sliding from July 3 to December 11.
Because Disney owns everything, it still has titles that have been displaced that it has not yet redated, including Antlers and the seemingly cursed The New Mutants, so there’s still more news to come out of the Mouse House in the age of the great coronavirus Hollywood shuffle.