Hollywood studios are abandoning summer 2020 release dates due to the Coronavirus pandemic. Coronavirus has brought society to a standstill, with entire countries under strict lockdown. China was the first country to close its theaters, but it's far from the last, and the global box office has essentially shut down for now.
Studios are scrambling to reschedule. MGM initially canceled No Time To Die's Chinese premiere and press tour, before rescheduling the James Bond film by seven months to November 2020. Disney pulled a range of films, including Josh Boone's New Mutants, Marvel Studios' Black Widow, and the live-action remake of Mulan, and they're yet to assign new release dates. Most recently, Sony Pictures has delayed movies out of summer 2020 into 2021. This even includes Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway, which was previously scheduled to come out in August. Studios are clearly abandoning summer 2020 altogether.
Studios are facing a nightmarish situation. Their coming slates will be shaped by forces completely out of their control; the duration of the pandemic, the length of lockdown measures both in the United States and in overseas territories, and even the chilling possibility of a winter resurgence of Covid-19. Complicating matters further, different territories have taken different approaches to tackling the pandemic, meaning the disruption may not last for the same duration in every country. Meanwhile, the financial cost of the pandemic is mounting, and the world faces a potential global recession. It's likely people will come out of this with less disposable income, and that could have a profound impact on viewing habits and the box office.
Studios don't pick release dates at a whim; there's a science to them, with studios choosing when to release a film based on their understanding of the market, competition in specific genres, past trends, and evidence of demand. Every date is carefully chosen in order to ensure a movie performs as well as possible. But Coronavirus has essentially shut down the industry in the short-term, and it's impossible to properly gauge its medium-term disruption. That's why risk-averse studios like MGM and Sony have moved their releases to November, or even to next year. Their hope is that things will have settled down by then.
This will have a pronounced, and lasting, impact on the box office slate over the next few years. Some movies are being adjusted to come out in 2021, and that means other studios will have to shuffle their 2021 slate around them. Of course, in some cases that would need to happen anyway; production is shut down due to the pandemic as well, meaning it will be difficult for films in early-to-mid 2021 to hit their own release dates. Making matters worse, any economic slowdown may mean future releases risk under-performing due to low turnout - a problem that could lead studios to reducing the number of releases, or staggering near-completed projects over a longer period of time so as not to oversaturate the market. Right now, the entire 2020 movie slate (and even beyond) should be seen as provisional.