Black Widow has a new release date and a Disney+ Premier Access streaming option for this coming summer. Pushing the movie’s release date out by two months makes sense, even if we’re disappointed to be missing it once again this spring. I know I’m not alone in wanting to see Black Widow in theaters, but I’m also not too keen on going to the theater without a vaccine.
Hopefully, by July, those of us who are still waiting to be vaccinated will have received their shots, and we can go to the theaters safely to see Natasha finally get her time. But the decision to also release the tentpole movie online at the same time as its theatrical release shows just how the landscape has shifted in Hollywood and how much studios are betting on streaming audiences. Disney’s Cruella will also receive the joint theater-and-streaming release.
Black Widow isn’t the only movie with an updated release date. A lot of Disney’s upcoming line-up, including movies they received from the Fox merger, now have new dates leading into 2022.
Theatrical releases for titles like Free Guy and The King’s Man are exciting because, for a while, we didn’t really have any idea of what was going to happen to those movies. After a certain point in 2020, continually pushing films out and giving them set-in-stone dates was doing more harm than good and kept us, as fans, feeling frustrated. The situation around movie theaters and movie releases wasn’t great and many of us (myself included) wanted studios to just wait and see where the course of the pandemic took us. So I’m glad that’s what Disney seems to have done here.
According to Disney’s press release, here are the upcoming slate changes as they now stand:
- Cruella on May 28, 2021
- Luca on June 18, 2021
- Black Widow on July 9, 2021
- Free Guy on August 13, 2021
- Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings on September 3, 2021
- The King’s Man on December 22, 2021
- Deep Water on January 14, 2022
- Death on the Nile on February 11, 2022
I’m excited to have more concrete release dates and to (hopefully) be vaccinated in time to see Black Widow in theaters!
(image: Marvel Entertainment)
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