by Benjamin Haines » Sat Jan 13, 2018 12:39 pm
This is wild! It raises so many questions.
What is up with The New Mutants? We were just three months away from its April 13 release date, we've already gotten the first trailer and poster, and now it's been bumped all the way to February of next year. Is this change purely about accommodating Deadpool 2's new release date, as that THR article suggests, or is this a sign of late-game retooling on the film?
As for Deadpool 2, holy moly! I guess Stacey Snider and other Fox executives/marketers haven't suddenly decided to be Disney's new best friends in the wake of the pending merger. Now Deadpool 2 will open just two weeks after Avengers: Infinity War and one week before Solo: A Star Wars Story. That is a bold move that projects an air of confidence about the film's potential, and rightfully so. Infinity War is probably going to perform much like Avengers: Age of Ultron and Captain America: Civil War, with a robust opening weekend and then relatively short legs as it plays mainly to audiences who have already been following the MCU. Solo's box office potential is a giant question mark but it's still likely to play mainly to the Star Wars faithful no matter how big its opening weekend. Deadpool 2 is the sequel to one of 2016's biggest breakout hits and it actually has the potential to do better than its predecessor with general audiences. I do wonder if Disney will respond by bumping Solo to December like their other Star Wars movies.
Will Gambit ever get made or not? Gore Verbinski is the third director to sign onto this project and later drop out, after Doug Liman quit in August 2016 and Rupert Wyatt quit in September 2015. If it does end up playing in theaters in summer 2019, Gambit will have been four years in the making by that time.
I think it's interesting how, out of the four X-Men franchise projects that Fox is currently working on, Simon Kinberg's Dark Phoenix is the only one that didn't get moved around. It's currently staying put with a November 2 release date.