‘The Batman’ and ‘Fantastic Beasts 3’ Still On Hold
By George Robbins
As many people have probably noticed by now, while many businesses are reopening or have plans to do so soon, movie productions are another subject entirely. Like the movie theaters the films will be showing in, film productions are going to have a lot of set restrictions to them when they resume. This means that many productions will either take longer to complete or they will have to wait until restrictions aren’t too bad. Many companies thus far have had to push back release dates for their movies all the way into next year due to the fact they aren’t sure when they can continue working on their films.
Many people became happy recently when it was announced that the U.K. would be relaxing a bit on its lockdown restrictions which would allow for the continued production of films. This opened up a series of possibilities for production companies since they could now make decisions about when they can finish their projects for release in theaters. However, it would appear that some movie productions will not be moving forward once the restrictions are eased up a bit, and they will instead be staying on hold for the foreseeable future. Those two movies would be ‘The Batman’ and the next sequel in the ‘Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them’ franchise.
When the pandemic began, ‘The Batman’ had already started filming before that had to cancel shooting for the film. With the original release date for the movie set for June of 2021, Warner Bros. had to delay the release a total of four months as of right now. ‘Fantastic Beasts 3’ was just getting ready for production to start when everything went south, so they have less to worry about and they can choose any moment to start up again. Even with the relaxing of restrictions they are deciding not to start up their film production again.
Warner Bros. is playing it safe with these two films in order to prevent much worse delays from eventually taking hold of those two films. They are however pushing forward with plans to continue production for the newest ‘Matrix’ sequel. WB wants to ensure that they can efficiently use the resources and talent at their disposal in order to get the film completed in an orderly manner. The other two films they know they will be able to work with on a later times table because the filming for them is much more lax by comparison. If they mess up now and get ahead of themselves they could end up making their delays much longer than they need to be and they could lose a lot of money.