Long-awaited blockbusters Tenet and New Mutants underperformed at the box office, so what will be the next big movie theater release? It's an undeniably tense time for film fans right now, with the worldwide coronavirus pandemic threatening to make the traditional cinema-going experience a thing of the past. The industry goliath Disney is reacting to low theater turnout and paltry box office receipts by pulling back its movie release dates across the board, with Black Widow, Eternals, and West Side Story all being delayed.
Disney isn't the only studio that has opted to react conservatively, with Warner Brothers pushing the release date of Wonder Woman 1984 and Sony Pictures Animation delaying the release of their upcoming family sci-fi comedy Connected indefinitely. With all of these high-profile releases being pulled back, it's easy for one to fear that cinemas will be empty for the foreseeable future. So what are the films which are still being released in the coming weeks?
Late September and early October are home to some more modest movie releases, with titles like Kajillionaire and The Last Shift both arriving in cinemas on September 25. The former is a quirky crime comedy from Miranda July and the latter is a subdued, poignant dramedy from Andrew Cohn, neither of which are likely to do the big business expected from Tenet or any of Disney's delayed titles. But these more modest independent productions could fare better without the weight of summer tentpole expectations on their shoulders, and there's a chance that smaller films garnering smaller audiences could be the boon that cinemas worldwide need.
At least that seems to be the plan, and it's not a bad idea as Hollywood studios have been overspending on budgets for some time now. The rest of the month's releases are similarly small scale indie productions. September 30th will see the arrival of Julie Taymor's Gloria Steinem biopic The Glorias while Darren Lynn Bousman's The Death of Me is the requisite Halloween horror released on October 2. The same release date's teen comedy Spontaneous will endeavor to make audiences laugh at a pandemic (a fictional pandemic of spontaneous combustion, but still a risky investment), while October 9th will herald the arrival of Timothee Chalamet's delayed collaboration with controversial director Woody Allen, A Rainy Day In New York.
However, it's ultimately the elderly who are likely to decide the future of movie theaters. October 9th and 16th brings the arrival of two projects which are expected to do bigger business than the above-mentioned indies, and both star aging actors who are cashing in on decades of audience goodwill. There's Robert DeNiro family comedy The War With Grandpa (Oct. 9), a family film which sees the Meet the Parents star playing the eponymous granddad embroiled in a prank war with his grandson, and Liam Neeson action thriller Honest Thief (Oct. 16), another dark and gritty outing from the Taken star.