The Camila Cabello-starring Cinderella and Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway are among the films Sony Pictures is kicking down the road due to coronavirus. Sony on Thursday bumped its video game adaptation Uncharted, led by the studio’s Spider-Man star Tom Holland, from July 16 to February 11, 2022; it now comes months after the new November 11 date of the now thrice-delayed Ghostbusters: Afterlife. The latest round of delays comes in the wake of MGM and Universal’s No Time to Die, a.k.a. Bond 25, abandoned April for October 8 — the same date Sony staked out for Jared Leto’s Morbius just last week.
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Two weeks before its planned February 5 opening in theaters, Sony’s Cinderella musical from Blockers director Kay Cannon is dancing to July 16, a date previously belonging to Spider-Man 3 and then Uncharted.
Peter Rabbit 2 is hopping out of Easter weekend and will trade April 2 for June 11, a date that until today belonged to the Ghostbusters sequel. The studio has reserved a June 25 opening for Venom: Let There Be Carnage, which would have released this past October were it not for the pandemic.
“We think the COVID environment is going to be up and down through Christmas. By late January, when the first vaccines get distributed and the infection rates start to slow down, we think you’ll see some seedlings of optimism,” Sony Pictures chief Tony Vinciquerra wrote for Variety on December 16. “In February and March if things continue to evolve in a positive way, I think in April and May you’ll see theaters start to reopen — with masks and with social distancing. A thousand crazy things could happen between now and then. But we see things starting to open up in the spring and summer. We think you’re going to see a blockbuster movie every week in theaters for 18 months. We think consumers will be in theaters.”
When Warner Bros. released the Christopher Nolan-directed Tenet into a limited number of theaters in September, Vinciquerra said Sony’s films with blockbuster potential — like Spider-Man and Venom — wouldn’t release until theaters were “operating at significant capacity.”
“What we won’t do is make the mistake of putting a very, very expensive $200 million movie out in the market unless we’re sure that theaters are open and operating at significant capacity,” Vinciquerra said during a conference. “You’ll see a lot of strange things happen over the next six months in how films are released, how they’re scheduled, how they’re marketed, but once we get back to normal, we will have learned a lot, I think, and found ways to do things that are somewhat different and hopefully better.”
