The current COVID-19 pandemic has forced Marvel to abandon a decade-long tradition that’s been going since Iron Man 2 by releasing Black Widow as the only MCU movie in 2020.
As it’s been made clear over the past few weeks, the repercussions of the novel coronavirus outbreak are more severe than what we originally thought. It shouldn’t come off as a surprise then that the entertainment industry has taken a massive hit in revenue and related sales. In fairness though, almost the entire world is currently under lockdown and governments are implementing extreme measures to curb the spread of the deadly disease, so it was only a matter of time before major studios and distributors shut down development on their ongoing projects as well or changed their business plan for the foreseeable future.
One such instance saw Marvel delay the release date of Black Widow from April 24th to November 6th, which also meant that other movies in Phase 4 had to be delayed. Unfortunately for fans, though, this also calls back to another precedent when the MCU released only one movie, Iron Man 2, in a year. Following that, Marvel Studios kept to a principled stream of 2 or 3 films each year, but the COVID-19 pandemic is going to break this record after a decade.
It goes without saying that every day the world continues to grapple with this deadly virus, companies like Disney stand to lose their revenue. As of now, the virus is winding through different regions in the globe and claiming victims by the minute, and with a liable vaccine candidate taking up to a year to go through different phases of testing, it’s up to the people to help authorities by self-isolating.
At any rate, though, with everything that’s going on in the world, let’s just say we’re glad that Marvel plans to release Black Widow at all, especially now that the possibility of a digital release is out of the window.