Sony Just Slaughtered Their Entire Summer Movie Slate

Stay. In. Your. House. Our entire society is restructuring itself in real time so that you can stay inside your house unless you have a really good reason to leave. For example, movie theaters are closed. And even if they were open, they would have nothing to show as studios are pulling releases of movies and shoving them to home video or rescheduling them for next year.

The latest studio to pull movies is Sony and it is an absolute bloodbath; the studio has pushed movies that don’t even have names yet according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Morbius, which was set to hit theaters July 31, is now set to open March 19, 2021. Ghostbusters: Afterlife is moving off of its July 10 release to March 5, 2021, which was previously occupied by the studio’s splashy video game adaptation Uncharted. The latter is now scheduled to debut Oct. 8, 2021, a date that was reserved for an untitled Sony Marvel movie, which now goes undated.

Why are we giving movies dates before names?

The interesting question is where is the line for movies that are going to go straight to VOD, even at that $20 price point for a rental that was worked out for films in the theatrical window. These are all clearly big tentpole movies that Sony wants that theatrical cash from, but they also pushed a Peter Rabbit sequel despite the first movie only making… holy s**t, Peter Rabbit made $350 million? That’s almost twice as much as Birds of Prey. And birds of prey eat rabbits!

Eventually, though, these movies are going to have to start making money somehow. Disney is cutting executive pay and their parks are shut down and they’re just sitting on a Marvel movie and a live-action remake that were both scheduled to come out before summer. Sony and other studios are in similar situations and as much as they’re going to want to hold back these films for big theatrical debuts it could be a long time until that’s feasible and they are eventually going to need to start bringing money in.