but in recent years discovered that movies
can do blockbuster numbers in nearly
any month.
That will be tested with Hollywood’s massively
revamped schedule. Wes Anderson’s “The
French Dispatch” will open on Oct. 16, “Black
Widow” will get her day on Nov. 6 and “Top Gun:
Maverick” is now set for Christmas time.
Some films abandoned 2020 entirely, including
the “Fast and Furious” movie “F9,” the Dwayne
Johnson, Emily Blunt adventure “Jungle Cruise,”
and “Ghostbusters: Afterlife,” which all pushed
to 2021.
It’s not as simple as just allowing venues to
reopen. Theaters need new movies to show and
the biggest on the horizon, “Tenet,” is still almost
three months away.
“The movie theater industry is also a national
one,” the National Association of Theatre Owners
said in a statement. “Until the majority of
markets in the U.S. are open, and major markets
in particular, new wide release movies are
unlikely to be available.”
The nation’s largest movie theater chain, AMC,
which operates over 630 theaters in the U.S.,
said in a statement that in order to reopen they
“need a line of sight into a regular schedule of
new theatrical blockbusters that get people
truly excited.”
AMC said it would open in the weeks ahead
of blockbusters like “Tenet” and “Mulan”
using “creative programming” of previously
released films.
Eric Wold, a wall street analyst for B. Riley FBR,
said there’s simply a lot of uncertainty right