Shazam! Fury of the Gods has its release date delayed for the third time, with DC pushing it back three months to a new March 2023 date.
Shazam!: Fury Of The Gods and Aquaman: The Lost Kingdom have
both been hit with delays as the new-look studio continues to shuffle its pack.
It’s been a topsy-turvy time over at Warner Bros ever since
the studio merged with Discovery. As ‘funeral screenings’ of the cancelled
Batgirl movie reportedly take place on the studio lot this week to show the
scrapped film to those who worked on it, the pall of uncertainty created by the
recent merger continues to cast a shadow over future plans.
At the beginning of the month, superhero films set for the
HBO Max streaming platform were in the crosshairs, with Wonder Twins and
Batgirl both being canned, despite the latter being close to completion.
By the middle of the month there was a ten year plan
announced (in a rather vague fashion) for the DC Extended Universe amid reports
of films such as The Flash, Joker: Folie à Deux and most recently, The Batman 2
being ‘safe’.
Now, here we are at the end of the month and any completed
DCEU project that sports a colon is once more in a state of flux with the news
that Aquaman: The Lost Kingdom and Shazam!: Fury Of The Gods have both been
delayed.
The Aquaman sequel has been pushed back a huge nine months
from March 17th 2023 to December 25th 2023. Meanwhile, Shazam!: Fury Of The
Gods (we’ll never get used to the awkwardness of that punctuation) which was
originally slated for December of this year and will now take over Aquaman’s
original March 2023 slot.
Whilst our first thought was that this move might have been
made to preserve the narrative integrity of the DCEU, with Aquaman: The Lost
Kingdom perhaps needing to arrive after The Flash, that’s not the case, as following
the last DCEU raft of delays in March (when Aquaman: The Lost Kingdom was also
delayed but Shazam!: Fury Of The Gods actually moved forwards), the studio had
the Aquaman sequel arriving before The Flash. Now though, it’s set to arrive
after that film.
Whether reshoots have meant the films can switch places, or
Michael Keaton’s reported removal (as the 1989 incarnation of Batman) from The
Lost Kingdom have made any differences to the narrative order, we don’t know.
However, The Hollywood Reporter did claim earlier this month
that delays were likely as the newly-formed Warner Bros Discovery had resulted
in the company having less marketing spend on movies, meaning it could only
afford to release one major DCEU tentpole over the course of the next year.
That their beloved comic book films are less of a priority
for the merged company may be alarming news for DCEU fans. Meanwhile, the
haphazard ‘restructuring’ of the DCEU continues to look a bit like a child
mashing together Lego bricks into different configurations until they find
something they like.
In other news, the Stephen King vampire adaptation, Salem’s
Lot has been removed from the release schedule entirely whilst the House Party
remake and Evil Dead Rises have been upgraded from streaming projects to
theatrical releases, with dates set for Dec. 9, 2022 and April 21, 2023
respectively. We’ll bring you more on Warner Bros’ shifting slate as we hear
it.
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