Yesterday, we talked about the House of Mouse’s announcement that Artemis Fowl will skip theatres and go straight to their streaming platform, Disney+. Artemis Fowl was riddled with production problems for the longest time and after heavy reshoots and a couple of postponements, the film was supposed to see a theatrical release this year. However, the Covid-19 pandemic has meant that Disney had to reshuffle their entire schedule. The studio eventually decided that it’s probably the best financial decision to release Artemis Fowl straight to Disney+. Frankly, I think it’s a good decision. There is little doubt in my mind that the secret agent fantasy film would’ve flopped big time.
Unsurprisingly, it looks like some other films that were supposed to be getting a theatrical release will be heading straight to Disney+ as well. In a recent interview with Barron’s, Disney Chairman Bob Iger said:
In terms of movies going ahead after Artemis, there may be a few more that we end up putting directly onto Disney+, but for the most part a lot of the big tentpole Disney films, we’ll simply wait for slots. In some cases we’ve announced new ones already, but later on in the calendar.
It’s important to note that this will not affect the big event films. The likes of Mulan and Black Widow will still be hitting theatres (phew!) and in fact, the House of Mouse has already released their updated release dates.
Bob Iger also talked about movies that were dropped on the streaming platform sooner than originally planned.
In some cases, we’ve moved things onto Disney+ faster than we would have. Frozen 2 was one of them, but Onward would be the biggest example. It was in theaters when this happened. We moved to a pay-per-view period for a couple of weeks where people could buy it and own it. And then we ended up putting it on Disney+.
