King Kong vs Godzilla is now set for March, and this prompts a very obvious question

Is there going to be a rush to schedule movies into theaters?

With political leadership in large urban centers calling for reopenings to get the retail world back on its feet, a "snooze, you lose" panic may hit movie conglomerates who may sense a chance to earn some real box office gold has miraculously arrived.

Usually, nailing down vaunted spring and summer weekend premiere dates was the domain of a lot of marketing strategy (and money) to pick the best calendar dates that wouldn't have a lot of competition showing up at the same time. But, the pandemic of 2020 blew up that entire business model, and now in the beginning of 2021, it looks like productions have contented themselves to aim for online streaming, or a hybrid theater/streaming method (which so far hasn't yielded very good results, Wonder Woman 1984, probably the biggest example of this mix-and-match strategy, hasn't come anywhere near covering the cost of its production budget).

But with the political will beginning to materialize to "get things back to normal," that will also include the lucrative world of movie box office. Movie companies are not going to want to show up last to the race for best release dates, even if they're not 100% committed to that future release date, since after all, there's talk of a "third wave" of the pandemic, of mutant variations of the virus, and so on, all possibly bringing in harder and harsher lock downs. But the chance there's going to be a sudden opening up of the American economy, especially since spring is coming and summer is not far behind, both warm time periods that seem to cause the virus to subside, there will be hoards of people (especially young people, for decades now the ideal target audience for movies) looking to buy tickets to something.

(For comparison, the Liam Neeson action film The Marksman was number #1 at the USA box office this holiday weekend with a cume of only $3.7 million.)

The quandary of openings and not-openings is not discussed in this video from IMB Movie Reviews (below) which covers just about everything else having to do with the turmoil of movie production:

Story about the schedule change for Godzilla vs King Kong into HBO Max and theaters also at Justjared.

Original page January 18, 2021