Galaxies far, far away are moving back even further now. Disney has announced that all of its upcoming Star Wars and Avatar films are being delayed a full year due to upheaval in the release and production schedule from the COVID-19 pandemic, amounting to postponements that will ripple through 2028.
It’s not clear which stories in the Star Wars universe were on the company’s internal schedule for the years ahead, but The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson had planned his own trilogy that was still in the works, and Jojo Rabbit Oscar-winner Taika Waititi is writing a separate project with 1917 screenwriter Krysty Wilson-Cairns
Three untitled Star Wars films are now being pushed back a full year each, and will now come out in December of 2023, 2025, and 2027.
James Cameron’s four upcoming Avatar sequels, which Disney acquired in its purchase of 20th Century Fox, are also being delayed a year apiece, with the first one debuting in December 2022. Another is now slated to debut every two years after in 2024, 2026, and wrapping up in 2028.
Disney’s live-action Mulan, originally set to debut this past spring, was most recently dated for Aug. 21, but now moves into limbo with no set date. “Over the last few months, it’s become clear that nothing can be set in stone when it comes to how we release films during this global health crisis, and today that means pausing our release plans for Mulan as we assess how we can most effectively bring this film to audiences around the world,” the studio said in a statement.
Among the other changes, the Fox Searchlight films The Personal History of David Copperfield will move back two weeks to Aug. 28, 2020, Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch has been pulled from its Oct. 16 date and is now unset, and the horror thriller Antlers will now come out Feb. 19, 2021.
Fox’s Agatha Christie movie Death on the Nile will move back two weeks to Oct. 23, while the horror-crime saga The Empty Man, which was set for August, is now coming out Dec. 4. Ridley Scott‘s medieval epic The Last Duel, starring Matt Damon, Jodie Comer, Ben Affleck and Adam Driver, has also been delayed from Dec. 25 of this year to Oct. 15, 2021.
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