With the COVID-19 pandemic showing no signs of abating and thousands dying every day, multiplexes aren’t expected to reopen anytime soon. This means yet more bad news for movie fans as the studios have just announced that many already delayed 2020 blockbusters are being pushed back again.
One of the casualties is Daniel Espinosa’s Morbius, which was originally supposed to release in July 2020, has seen multiple COVID-19-induced postponements and will now arrive on January 21st, 2022. Sadly, then, it looks like 2021 is going to be another relatively superhero-free year for cinema.
After all, it seems very likely that Black Widow is going to miss its May 7th release date and if this happens, then expect the MCU Phase 4 movies to be postponed once more, with Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings and Eternals potentially heading into 2022. I’m betting that Venom: Let There Be Carnage will also miss its June 25th release date, though there’s some hope given that it wasn’t included in the recent announcements.
On the bright side, we know that James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad is hitting HBO Max on August 6th, 2021 and it’s probable that Spider-Man 3 will release on December 17th (especially as it seems to be set over Christmas). In addition, March will see the long-awaited Justice League Director‘s Cut, which at four hours long technically provides the superhero action of at least two regular movies.
Still, the Morbius delay is frustrating as we were anticipating confirmation on how Sony’s cinematic universe was going to cross over with the MCU. We saw Michael Keaton reprise his Spider-Man: Homecoming role as Vulture in the first trailer, have seen an image of Spidey with “murderer” scrawled across it (referencing the end of Far From Home) and it’s likely that J.K. Simmons will appear as J. Jonah Jameson in the movie.
All that makes for a lot of questions on how these two universes are connected, but we won’t get the answers for a whole year now as Morbius isn’t hitting theaters until January 21st, 2022.