As the future continues—despite best efforts—to get uncomfortably more close, the next wave of upcoming movie releases is getting ever nearer to their own “shit or get off the pandemic pot” moment. Now that the vast majority of April and May film releases have been wiped from the theatrical release slate—on account of the theatrical release buildings being mostly shuttered by government order—studios are now finding themselves forced to start looking at their summer line-ups for possible delays, too. Hence Variety reporting today that Universal is finally doing what so many have lusted to do over the years: Give a massive boot to the Minions franchise, which has just had its upcoming Minions: The Rise Of Gru shunted from July 3, 2020 to nearly a full year later, July 2, 2021. That, in turn, is bouncing Sing 2 from its own spot to December of next year, which is dislodging the Wicked film adaptation from its own spot, which, yeah, that one actually seems like a decent call.
Although animation has been mostly viewed as being more resilient to the effects of the coronavirus lockdowns (at least, so far), The Rise Of Gru has had its post-production efforts impeded because of the closure of one of the studios working on it in France. That being said, there’s no guarantee Universal would have released it to streaming, anyway; it’s still hard to tell how the studio’s own Trolls: World Tour is going to do when it gets bunted onto digital storefronts next week. Minions isn’t the first movie to take a full-year gap to wait out the shuttering of the planet’s theaters, either; the ninth Fast And The Furious movie also blasted its way out of 2020 earlier this year.
As for Sing—the sequel to the C- animated jukebox musical from 2016—it had already gotten the bump for The Croods 2, so we can’t imagine it’s exactly a priority project right now. The Wicked adaptation, meanwhile, has been knocked off the calendar entirely, presumably on the grounds that planning anything as elaborate as a full-scale movie musical sounds just absolutely exhausting right now.
