Hollywood wasnt built for a year without theaters

Hollywood scheduling has always run like a finely tuned watch: a delicate dance of release dates as studios try to optimize movies for the most money, avoiding other massive blockbusters, while juggling the shifting demands of film editing, reshoots, and special effects work.

But the shuttering of theaters by the pandemic has thrown all of that into disarray, forcing studios to shift release dates in a chaotic cascade. Each change has ripple effects due to that strict schedule: when one massive superhero film moves dates, it trickles down the line, forcing both movies from within the studio and from competitors to shuffle their dates to avoid risking splitting their audiences (and box office takes).

Small delays turned into large ones;...

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