Dont Tell NetflixDont Tell Netflix

By George Robbins

Back in March of this year, the world was turned on its head when the World Health Organization announced the global Covid-19 pandemic. An almost immediate response to this was the closing of almost all public venues and only essential businesses remained open to the public. This resulted in numerous people being put out of work and all forms of entertainment were forced to shut down. Thus, no one could go out to restaurants, bars, movie theaters, etc. and they would go on to spend months cooped up in their homes without being able to go and visit others. Beyond just businesses being shut down is the fact that things such as international travel to movie and television productions had no choice but to shut down as well.

In an attempt to keep the virus from spreading even more than necessary, major motion pictures had no choice but to shut down. Whether they had actually started the production or not, they were forced to close up shop to the public. This is how we ended up with productions like ‘The Batman‘ and the ‘Uncharted‘ adaptation being shut down and only now are they starting to get some work done again. Other major productions ended up being lucky and managed to get work done at home because they had already filmed a decent chunk of footage already. This ended up being the case for ‘Jurassic World 3’ and they were actually able to get VFX work done at home without any kind of rush or worry about finishing the work. Some productions haven’t been lucky enough to start getting back to work yet though.

Productions like ‘Mission: Impossible 7‘ have not been able to get back to work yet and will not be doing so until September to get the crew and equipment prepped. They even managed to get special permission to start filming again immediately instead of having to wait out the 2 week quarantine that would normally be in place. This is a standard for any productions nowadays because if anyone is traveling to a foreign nation they must remain in quarantine for 2 weeks to ensure they aren’t bringing in the virus. Although it seems that productions are getting back underway amidst the ongoing chaos, things are about to slow down again for many of them. Governor Newsom of California recently shut his state down again in the midst of a surge in coronavirus cases and this is now presenting a new challenge for things like productions moving forward.

For instance, now that the shelter-in-place orders have been put back into affect, many businesses have had no choice but to close up shop again. This includes things like restaurants and movie theaters; the latter of which weren’t really opened up anyway. It would seem that this won’t entirely shut down Hollywood like the beginning of the pandemic, but it does present some problems moving forward for studios. These issues include the newly placed into effect Tiered Testing System which tests individuals according to the severity of symptoms. The surge in new cases recently has resulted in testing taking longer to get results for and this is inadvertently going to affect productions. If studios can’t test their employees, then they will not be able to have them work and, in the end, this presents the issue of delays once again for studios. They might just find a way to work around this issue, but for now there is no telling what will happen.