Wonder Woman 1984 Reportedly Facing Another Round Of Bad News
From very early on, Wonder Woman 1984's release date has been in an almost constant state of flux. As announced way back in July 2017 (barely a month after the debut of the first Wonder Woman), the sequel was originally slated to arrive on December 13, 2019. In November of that same year, Warner Bros. made the strategic decision to move the release of Wonder Woman 1984 up to November 1, 2019, in order to avoid competition with Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker.
It turned out that Wonder Woman was not destined to return in 2019 at all, and on October 22, 2018 Wonder Woman herself, Gal Gadot, tweeted out that Wonder Woman 1984 had been moved to June 5, 2020, "back to its rightful home" as a summer blockbuster. After all, the original Wonder Woman film had arrived just after Memorial Day weekend, and now its sequel would do the same. It also didn't hurt that Joker was getting a lot more buzz than Warner Bros. anticipated, leaving them free to place a little more breathing room between the two films.
No one could've foreseen that there was a pandemic coming, but as we all now know, COVID-19 shattered industry schedules beginning in March, leaving Warner Bros. to move Wonder Woman 1984 to August 14, 2020, and then again in June to October 2, 2020. Unfortunately, we're learning that the story of Wonder Woman's long delay probably won't end there.
Wonder Woman 1984, Tenet, and Dune all impact each other
Deadline recently reported that Warner Bros. is supposedly considering another Wonder Woman 1984 delay, this time to either November or even December 2020.
New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco (all major markets) have yet to open movie theaters completely, which has been wreaking havoc on films that have attempted to release in the late summer. The New Mutants has only brought in about $12 million as of this writing, and another Warner release, Tenet, only made $20 million in its opening weekend. $20 million for a Christopher Nolan film is, for the record, abysmal.
Let's face it: October 2, 2020, isn't far away, and with theater openings still uncertain, it's not a big surprise that Wonder Woman 1984 could be delayed. Warner Bros. likely will want to give Tenet more time to find its legs at the very least.
For moviegoers, however, there is also the question of what other films might be impacted by Wonder Woman 1984's delay. Warner is currently slated to release the long-awaited, Denis Villeneuve-directed adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune on December 18, 2020. If Wonder Woman 1984 is postponed to November or December, the likely bet is that Dune will get bumped from its spot and will also be delayed. Since Dune was a huge investment for Warner Bros. and January is traditionally a dead month for box office (regardless of whether anything about the movie business will ever be called "traditional" again), it's likely that it would be delayed to February at the absolute earliest.
In short: Wonder Woman 1984 is probably getting delayed at least one more time, and that would almost certainly mean even more schedule reshuffling from the studio. More information on this story as it develops.