Tom Holland’s Long-Delayed Chaos Walking Earns January 2021 Release Date

It might seem like a bad joke at this point, but Lionsgate’s long delayed adaptation of the YA book Chaos Walking finally has a release date. The feature film starring both Tom Holland AND Daisy Ridley has been delayed for many years at this point, and has now been set for a January 22, 2021 release date by the studio. Lionsgate confirmed the news on Twitter, highlighting the sheer amount of questions they get about the movie from eager fans online who frequently ask about.

It has been a long road for Chaos Walking. Lionsgate first picked up the rights to Patrick Ness’ book series in 2011, hoping to cash in on a new YA craze like they had before with The Hunger Games and The Twilight Saga. It was developed for many years before Doug Liman (Edge of Tomorrow, The Bourne Identity) eventually became attached as director in 2016 with Daisy Ridley being the first to join the cast that same year. Principal photography on the film was conducted from August to November of 2017 but after a disastrous test screening where it was labeled “unreleasable,” the Wall Street Journely reported that it would undergo extensive reshoots.

While those reshoots eventually took place, they had to wait on openings in the schedules of its stars as Tom Holland was filming Spider-Man: Far From Home for most of 2018 and Daisy Ridley was filming Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker in the same time frame. The reshoots for the movie finally took place in the early summer of 2019, just ahead of the release of Avengers: Endgame.

To provide further context of how long this film has been in the works, Ridley started filming Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker a year after she filmed Chaos Walking, and Episode IX was released six weeks ago while Chaos Walking won’t arrive for another year. Furthermore, Holland will start shooting the third Spider-Man movie from Marvel Studios and Sony later this year and it will arrive just six months after Chaos Walking, that is assuming it isn’t delayed yet again.

According to IMDb, the film tells the story of “a dystopian world where there are no women and all living creatures can hear each others’ thoughts in a stream of images, words, and sounds called Noise.” Joining Ridley and Holland in the film are Mads Mikkelsen (Hannibal, Doctor Strange), Cynthia Erivo (Bad Times at the El Royale, Widows), and David Oyelowo (Selma, The Cloverfield Paradox).