Chaos Walking has finally been given a new January 2021 release date, making this the newest development for a project now best known for its extensive delays. Prior to those endless setbacks, Chaos Walking was once hyped up to be the next big young-adult franchise for Lionsgate, in the mold of past hits for the studio like Twilight, The Hunger Games and Divergent. Like those prior Lionsgate titles, Chaos Walking is based on a popular book series, with this particular feature being based on the first entry, The Knife of Letting Go, in the Chaos Walking series by Patrick Ness.
The movie adaptation of The Knife of Letting Go, entitled Chaos Walking, is directed by Doug Liman and is set in a near-future world marked by a total absence of women, where people have the ability to hear the minds of humans and animals. Both of these factors can be chalked up to a pathogen that ravaged this planet, which is home to the film's protagonist, Todd Hewitt (Tom Holland). Hewitt finds his entire perception of reality shattered when he stumbles upon a woman named Viola Eade (Daisy Ridley). The two proceed to go on the lam together while discovering that the world they inhabit, as well as powerful figures like David Prentiss (Mads Mikkelsen), have plenty of secrets that they're keeping.
Originally slated for release on March 1, 2019, Chaos Walking is now set to hit theaters on January 22, 2021. The primary reason for this delay is an element that's extremely common among modern-day blockbusters: reshoots. Back in spring 2018, it was announced that Chaos Walking would be undergoing a series of extensive reshoots that would lead to a delay in its release. It's a process many prior Doug Liman directorial efforts have undergone, including American Made, The Bourne Identity and Edge of Tomorrow. Whether the changes will be enough to make the movie a hit remains to be seen, but expensive reshoots can drive up a movie's production budget and put on extra pressure to perform at the box office.
It remains to be seen if Chaos Walking will meet the positive end results that have greeted past Liman movies, but for now it's clear that the shoots are the main reason the title experienced such a hefty delay. Another complication was scheduling the reshoots, which ended up taking place around a month after the movie's original release date. The downside of casting two in-demand stars like Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley was that they had other major projects on their plate, like Spider-Man: Far From Home and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.
The two-year delay is problematic for Chaos Walking not only in terms of the extra expense of the reshoots, but also because of where it has landed in the calendar with its new release date. January is traditionally one of the worst months of the year for box office, and therefore the month where studios tend to dump movies that they have little faith in, so that they don't take up a more lucrative release slot later in the year. A recent is Robert Downey Jr.'s Dolittle, which also underwent reshoots in an effort to fix it, and was moved from a May 2019 release date to January 2020 - becoming this year's first big box office disaster.
Between the long delay and now being given one of the worst release weekends of the year, Chaos Walking is fighting some very difficult odds. Still, perhaps the combination of Liman's skilled action genre directing and its two young stars will be enough to save it yet.