Many production companies are re-working the releases of their movies due to the coronavirus outbreak.

By Rebekah Karp, Staff Writer/Artist

It is no surprise to anyone that in these times, businesses and industries are in mayhem. The stock market is dangerously close to crashing, the shelves are being emptied, my family ran out of toilet paper yesterday and the roads are Walking Dead poster barren. The world is starting to look like a Hollywood blockbuster.

 And Hollywood is nervous about that. 

After the mandatory shut down of all non-essential destinations, like theaters, many production companies are re-working their releases of movies. This is a good thing now, but it could be devastating in the near future. Disney has pulled their most recent release, a star-studded animated movie called Onward, from theaters and is planning on releasing the movie straight to Disney+, their streaming service. This is great for the families couped up in their homes looking for a bit of normalcy and something new. 

Other movies had worse luck, though. Vin Diesel’s newest movie, Bloodshot, based on a best-selling comic series, had one of the lowest box-office openings of a movie in years. It is now released on digital renting platforms such as Fandango, but the problem is, will this become the new normal? 

A lot of talk is going around about how easy it is to just rent one of these new blockbusters in the comfort of your home and at a feasibly cheaper price than a trip to the theater. So, will this make Hollywood believe that these online streams may be better for business? I hope not. 

There is nothing like going to see a new movie in the theaters and then enduring the long, agonizing wait for the release to own it on DVD or in some other way. That is also the shared belief of some production companies since they pushed off the release of their upcoming movies to when all of this apocalypse talk will be a memory. I look forward to the day that the theaters open back up, and we can all go back to experiencing movies as a community, as they are meant to be.