Disney’s Mulan Gets Postponed Indefinitely; Star Wars And Avatar Sequels Pushed Back A Year

Disney’s Mulan will no longer be released in August. Not only that, it’s been pulled from the studio’s release calendar schedule.

The US$200 million (S$280 mil) epic — starring Liu Yifei as a Chinese soldier who disguises herself as a man to spare her sickly father from being conscripted — was supposed to drop March 27. But the COVID-19 pandemic forced Disney to push its release to July 25 and then to Aug 21.

In Singapore, Mulan was slated to open on Aug 20.

“Over the last few months, it’s become clear that nothing can be set in stone when it comes to how we release films during this global health crisis, and today that means pausing our release plans for Mulan as we assess how we can most effectively bring this film to audiences around the world,” a Disney spokesperson (as per Variety).

Disney’s decision to delay Mulan came a few days after Warner Bros announced that it was shifting Christopher Nolan’s Tenet from August to an unspecified date in 2020 or what’s left of 2020.

Besides Mulan, Disney has also delayed the releases of all Avatar sequels by a year: Avatar 2 (Dec 17, 2021 is now Dec 16, 2022), Avatar 3 (Dec 22, 2023 to Dec 20, 2024), Avatar 4 (Dec 19, 2025 to Dec 18, 2026), and Avatar 5 (Dec 27, 2027 to Dec 22, 2028).

The untitled Star Wars trilogy are affected, too. The first instalment, reportedly to be helmed by Taika Waititi, will move from Dec 16, 2022 to Dec 22, 2023; the second movie will shift from Dec 20, 2024 to Dec 19, 2025; and the final chapter will come out on Dec 17, 2027 instead of Dec 18, 2026.

But August is not totally devoid of Hollywood content. There's Scoob!, the Scooby Doo animated feature premiering on July 30.The X-Men spin-off, New Mutants, is still on track to roll out in Singapore on August 27. For now, that is.

Cinemas in Singapore reopened on July 13 and the first blockbuster to rock the box-office is the Korean zombie pic Train to Busan: Peninsula, which took home $962,000 in its opening weekend (July 16-19). It set a new all-time highest opening weekend record for Korean films, beating out 2016’s Train to Busan's $611,000. It's a remarkable feat considering that the cinemas aren't running in full capacity because of safe-distancing protocols.