Denis Villeneuve’s ‘Dune’ Is Being Pushed to Late 2021
By George Robbins
The movie industry is currently sitting in perhaps one of the worst declines that they have ever seen due to the current state of affairs. The Covid-19 pandemic has done nothing but make everyday life more difficult for everyone, including businesses. This stems from the fact that people are still not capable of coming too close together without risk of contracting the virus which severely limits the capabilities of some businesses. Theaters, being buildings that serve the purpose of bringing together groups of people in order to make money, have been affected especially hard. This is mostly due to the fact that, although there are restrictions in place to protect people, there are tons of people who don’t want to take the risk.
Restrictions are in place so that only so many people will actually be able to go into a theater at one time to increase the physical distance between patrons. This is still the best way for people to avoid coming into contact with others who may actually end up having the virus. Therefore, it is of no real surprise that they would end up losing overall business as a result of this and they are left with less overall income. Unfortunately, this trend is not going to change anytime soon especially with no sign of a vaccine coming out any time soon. As such, theaters are one of the last places that people want to go out to in the near future.
Some people have been saying that people shouldn’t worry about going out to theaters because there have yet to really be any incidents of infection tied to theaters. However, it is highly likely that this is the case only due to the fact that people aren’t going to theaters at all. After all, if people aren’t going out to theaters at all due to fear of contracting the virus, then there are less people in theaters. If there are less people in theaters, then it means that there are a lot less people around who are capable of transmitting the disease. This is something people shouldn’t be surprised about, and they should instead focus on whether or not this fear should be warranted because, as of now, it still is.
If movie theaters were to have full crowds of people coming in and sitting down for hours at a time near one another, the likelihood of infection skyrockets. Even if people are not near one another and must wear masks, there are people who won’t follow those rules. This ends up leading to people inadvertently becoming infected even if they weren’t doing anything wrong. hence the reason why people are ultimately wary of going out to theaters at all. There are plenty of other examples made with other public businesses that this could end up happening in theaters and it has made people question them. This is why, at least in the United States, theaters are not doing so well and movies are being pushed back further.
In the past month or so, the decline of movie theaters in the United States has been noticed pretty well by the public at large. This has mostly been to the failure of the ‘Tenet’ box office over the course of the past month or so. ‘Tenet‘ is Christopher Nolan’s newest blockbuster film which he was hoping would have revitalized the movie theater market. The film follows a spy as he does his best to prevent World War 3 while simultaneously having to deal with some kind of weird time manipulation element. Needless to say, things did not end up working out once the movie hit the U.S. marketplace, and the film has barely been making any returns since its release.
‘Tenet’ was Warner Bros. biggest release that they had planned around this time and they needed it to succeed to make back the $500 million they needed to break even before marketing costs. Unfortunately they have yet to reach that goal but the international movie theater market has made it within the realm of possibility that this could happen. This is because other nations have a better handle on the virus and, therefore, people are more willing to go to the movies in other countries as they feel safer. Domestically, with fears surrounding theaters, people don’t want to see the film and put themselves at risk, so it isn’t doing so well here. Since studios still want to have their domestic releases first to properly kick off their films, they have been pushing releases.
Plenty of releases have been pushed back over the course of the past month and the trend doesn’t seem to be stopping. According to a report from ‘Collider‘, Denis Villeneuve’s ‘Dune‘ has recently joined the list of films with delayed release dates. Originally, the movie was set to release in December of this year, but so many other films have now ended up in that release window that they have decided not to go with that release window. Now it would appear that to try and better accommodate for the fact that there is no vaccine and people just don’t seem like going to theaters, they have really pushed their release date back. The movie now has a release window centered around some time in October of 2021 and like most films, this is still tentative.