Warner Bros. has reportedly delayed the release date of Dune to Oct. 1, 2021, pushing the movie almost a year from its original December date.
The Dune delay was first reported by Collider, which asserted that the decision to push the movie back hads “nothing to do” with the quality of the movie but the continued moviegoing complications caused by the Covid-19 pandemic — just yesterday, Cineworld, owner of Regal Cinemas, announced that it would temporarily suspend operations in the US and UK. Per the outlet, Villeneuve supported the decision to move the movie to next year.
The delay could mean that The Batman is going to move on the release calendar since that DC movie is also currently scheduled for Oct. 1, 2021. While it wouldn’t be the first time a studio has released two major tentpole movies so close to each other, it seems unlikely that WB would risk cannibalizing two of its biggest upcoming movies. That said, there’s no precedence for this particular situation, as major studios try to respond accordingly to a pandemic that has now killed over a million people worldwide.
Collider says that Wonder Woman 1984, which was recently delayed to Christmas Day, is still set to bow this year. It remains to be seen if that will still be the case in the next few weeks. One model from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington predicts as many as 300,000 Americans could succumb to Covid-19 by December. That hardly sounds like a situation in which movie theaters will be able to open safely.
This is a developing story…