With the movie theater industry seemingly collapsing this past weekend, studios are scrambling to figure out what to do with their upcoming releases. After MGM announced that it would be pushing back No Time To Die into April 2021, Universal decided to follow suit with F9 (aka Fast and Furious 9). The apparently two-part epic will now be hitting theaters on May 28, 2021.
The push to Memorial Day weekend is no coincidence. While no one can be certain if theaters will be opened in seven months’ time, there’s the hope that a big, patriotic holiday weekend will spur citizens to head to the theaters and partake in Vin Diesel’s latest wreck fest of a film.
Another reason for the delay is that Universal is handling the international release of No Time To Die. Pitting it directly against F9 would be a massive problem since the studio would be competing against itself. With theaters having fallen so dramatically over the course of 2020, no studio would want to cannibalize its own sales while trying to reestablish the theater market across the globe.
I can’t say if the wait will be worth it for F9, but Universal is making the right call. There’s no sense in trying to get people into theaters during this tumultuous period.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
