‘The Batman’ Won’t Finish Filming Until Early 2021
By George Robbins
There are a ton of movies that are currently awaiting to have their releases finalized nowadays due to the pandemic we are all suffering through. The pandemic has caused countless issues to arise after it started back in March of this year and it is only going to continue as time goes on. The biggest issues that are arising for just about everyone are being centered around the fact that businesses are trying their best to reopen in a way that goes along with the new health and safety guidelines that are in place. With those new rules in place, many businesses began the arduous process of making themselves follow in accordance with the new guidelines so that people could once again visit their places. This is all people have wanted since the pandemic first began and it is now becoming more and more of a reality.
Of course, now that people are mostly free to go back to the places they used to frequent before the pandemic, it doesn’t mean it is something that is easy to do. The new guidelines create strict rules for both owners and occupants and also limit the number of occupants that can go into a business. This has become a huge issue for businesses that rely very heavily on just bringing in more and more people to generate their revenue. Unfortunately this is not something that can be rectified with new rules and regulations being put in place and some businesses are having a hard time adapting to all of this. This is the primary issue which is currently being faced by the movie theater industry, and by extension, the movie industry as a whole.
Movie theaters have been trying to assess their damage properly ever since the pandemic began by trying to see just how long they would end up being shut down for. Unfortunately for them, this ended up being far longer than they thought it would be because individual states had different rules in place in regards to public businesses reopening. Theaters often found their places near the bottom of the list for businesses which were allowed to open up their doors yet again. On top of this, there were the many issues involving studios where the studios themselves were not sure of when they should release their films. On top of this, the new guidelines they had to follow were anything but easy to get on top of and put into place.
Like every other business that wanted to once again open their doors to the public, movie theaters had no choice but to follow the instructions given to them by the government. These guidelines did the aforementioned things like limiting occupancy and making sure that people were following the new social distancing guidelines. On top of this, health and safety guidelines that made sure that public places remained clean also had a hand in making things difficult as surfaces were meant to be cleaned on a much more regular basis. With all of this in mind, is it really any surprise that it took so long for theaters to finally reopen their doors to the public?
The ultimate decision to reopen their doors to the public came out near the end of July as theater companies decided they didn’t care if they didn’t have any films to immediately show to the public. With that announcement, movie studios decided to also go along with this initiative and we finally started getting true release dates for theaters. The biggest movie that was going to be released that ended up on everyone’s mind ended up being the movie ‘Tenet.’ Despite its relatively strong opening weekends in both the international and domestic markets, it started failing at the box office after the third week. This didn’t exactly inspire confidence in movie studios and it heavily affected how the movie industry will be moving forward.
After ‘Tenet’ failed to do what people were hoping for by bringing business back to theaters, studios became very wary of when they wanted to release their films. This resulted in the mass exodus of films from this year’s line-up into some time next year, with many ending up being pushed into late next year. The problem is that the general public are rightfully wary of returning to public places like theaters where they may end up getting sick. This has led to many people deciding against going out to theaters which led to the horrific decline that theaters are now stuck in. Regal cinemas even went and took the next step by shutting down until further notice while the pandemic is going on in order to try and save money wherever possible.
Despite everything that is going on with movie theaters in general at the moment, studios are still doing their best to work on future films. Even if there are a lot of movies that are waiting to be released, there are a lot of movies that are ready to be worked on so that when the pandemic ends, studios don’t fall behind. Also, just because theaters shut down doesn’t mean that studios have no way of movie forward with their films. In fact, they just need to focus more on how they want to release them by deciding which movies they want to release on what platform. This is what Disney is actually doing now as they have decided to take a much stronger stance on their streaming service. As streaming has exploded since people have been stuck at home for so long, it is no surprise that they would end up doing this.
Despite the fact that Disney has made the decision to focus more on streaming, they will not at all be abandoning their movie theater releases. In fact, they have made it pretty apparent at this point that they instead just decided that movies that they believe won’t do as well in theaters will instead go over to their streaming service. This is pretty much what everyone expected to happen though and they are still saving their bigger releases for whenever they can possibly put them into theaters. Thus, just like every other studio, they have a lot to do moving forward as they are also continuing to create new content. While they have been the most vocal about their plans, there are certainly other companies which will try to do the same thing moving forward.
One of the biggest movie studios out there is the Warner Bros. studio and they have had a lot on their minds recently with this pandemic. In fact, they are the ones suffering from the fact that ‘Tenet’ is not doing so well since it was produced through their studio. They need to make a fortune on the movie just to try and break even and it hasn’t been easy with no one wanting to go out to theaters to put their health at risk. That being said, like Disney, they have their own streaming service which they can act through while simultaneously working on new projects. After all, while Disney has had more success with the MCU, Warner has the DCEU that they are still working on. While the DCEU may not be as popular, it has made plenty of money for the studio thus far and it will continue to do so with their upcoming films.
The DC Extended Universe, or DCEU, may not have the complexity or the same level of fame that the MCU has, but it is easily one of Warner’s strongest set of properties. It has easily become a polarizing topic over the years as each film belonging in the franchise has released and with those releases, we saw many films hit the wall. Despite hitting the proverbial wall, many movies in the DCEU have brought Warner a lot of money and therefore, many more films are to follow in the future. Hence the reason so many DCEU films are either being worked on, or there are plans in the works to have them be worked on in the near future. The one that is now on everyone’s minds is the upcoming standalone film ‘The Batman.’
‘The Batman’ sees Robert Pattinson taking on the role of a young, yet fierce iteration of the caped crusader while he is in his early years of wearing the cowl. The movie was among many others that were forced to postpone their productions due to the start of the pandemic and they recently resumed filming back in September after months of waiting. No one know what to expect out of the film, but after DC FanDome, we now know that this movie will be one that we should all look forward to seeing. The trailer for the film had fans going from skeptical to completely on board after it dropped and people were incredibly excited to find out we would get to see this film next year. Unfortunately, soon after, the movie had its release date pushed back to early 2022.
Between the trailer and the high praise that people working on the film have had for it, it is no surprise that people are clamoring to want to go and see the movie. When it resumed filming, information was given that the movie was a portion of the way done with filming before the production began again. However, it is more than likely that the movie will have reshoots done in order to make sure that everything is perfect by the time of release. That being said, the movie is apparently already shaping up to be something quite interesting since they are going to be working on it for some time still. Word has come out that the movie will be seeing a finished production date some time in early 2021 which makes it very much possible for more to happen with the film’s post-production.
Warner Bros. are not strangers to working heavily on films during post-production, but unlike other films, this might be warranted. From what fans have seen already, they will be expecting nothing but the best from this movie. So it is not going to far to say that the best way of making sure that this film ends up being the best version of itself is to have as much time as possible to prepare it. It is for this reason that the movie is apparently going to wrap filming some time in February, wherein they will have approximately 13 months to work on post-production before the film releases. While this pandemic has most certainly changed the time-frames in a disadvantageous way, there is no doubt that they will make use of that time to try and make the movie great.