The more optimistic among us were starting to think that business might finally be picking up for the theatrical industry after Christopher Nolan’s Tenet scored the biggest opening weekend that the domestic box office had seen for six months when it arrived last week. In fact, the director’s latest epic thriller has already raced to a global tally of over $150 million despite thousands of screens remaining closed.
It would appear that more people are willing to take the plunge and head to their local multiplex than there’s been for a long time, and Warner Bros. were poised to continue dominating the box office with Wonder Woman 1984 scheduled for release in just three weeks. However, the studio has now announced that they’re pulling the DCEU sequel from its October date and will instead bring it to theaters on December 25th.
Presumably, the $220 million Tenet isn’t bringing in the kind of numbers to make another massively expensive blockbuster a viable enterprise at this moment in time, and there’s every chance we could be seeing a second domino effect caused by the Coronavirus pandemic, as the big budget likes of Black Widow and No Time to Die are also tentatively set for the next couple of months.
Wonder Woman 1984 will now be settling into its fifth release date having originally been pencilled in for December 2019 before being pushed back to June, August and then October of this year. The calendar is already pretty bare as it is in terms of movies that are actually capable of drawing in a wide audience, and now we’ll have to wait and see how the rest of Hollywood’s major studios are going to react to this latest development.
