Sony delays Ghostbusters: Afterlife and more films to 2021

Sony Pictures has concluded that when it comes to releasing a new movie, this summer don't look good.

The studio announced this week it's delaying its upcoming film Ghostbusters: Afterlife eight months due to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, moving it from its original release date of July 10 all the way to March 5, 2021. Sony has additionally delayed Morbius from July 2020 to March 2021, and Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway from August 2020 to January 2021. Greyhound has also been postponed indefinitely after having set a June 2020 release, and Uncharted has moved from March 2021 to October 2021, per Variety.

These become the latest major Hollywood movies to be postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic, which forced theaters to shutter throughout the country. Just last week, Warner Bros. delayed Wonder Woman 1984 from June, but the studio actually moved it to August, hoping theaters would widely resume operations by that point. With Ghostbusters, though, Sony has opted for a date outside of the summer, and 2020, entirely.

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Other major films that have been postponed but not given new release dates in recent weeks include Black Widow and Mulan, while Universal moved the ninth Fast & Furious film from May 2020 to April 2021. Fewer and fewer major blockbusters remain on the calendar for the traditional summer movie season, with two that have yet to move including Top Gun: Maverick and Christopher Nolan's Tenet.

The first major film to experience a coronavirus-related delay was the James Bond movie No Time to Die, which moved from April to November. At that point, theaters were still open in the United States but had closed in China, a major theatrical market. China recently began to reopen some of its movie theaters, only to order them all to close down again not long after.