As scary as it may sound, Dec. 2022 is already looking like a very competitive month at the box office.
While you may have not even decided what you’re having for dinner yet, movie studios are planning years ahead. When it was announced that Aquaman 2 is going to release on Dec. 16, 2022, that seemed like so far away it wasn’t even worth considering. Then along comes Disney on Tuesday with a schedule that takes its movie slate up through Dec. 2027.
Since Disney purchased 21st Century Fox, it has had a gigantic movie schedule it needed to contend with. On Tuesday it took care of most of that housekeeping and came up with a plan to deal with. The biggest question mark is what it would do with James Cameron’s Avatar films and the Star Wars films as both of them like to target Dec. release dates. It came up with a solution that will see the two series alternating.
- 12/17/21 – Avatar 2
- 12/16/22 – Unknown Star Wars
- 12/22/23 – Avatar 3
- 12/20/24 – Unknown Star Wars
- 12/19/25 – Avatar 4
- 12/18/26 – Unknown Star Wars
- 12/17/27 – Avatar 5
That first new Star Wars film is now coming out the same day as Aquaman 2 is due to hit theaters. Seeing as the Aquaman 2 date has been known for some time now, there is no way Disney was not aware of this when it came up with these dates. To be fair, Disney is trying to nail down a pattern for seven films, while Warner Bros. is only looking at one. That being said, there is no way these two studios are going to want to risk two movies with the potential of doing a billion dollars each cannibalizing each other.
Someone is going to blink and move. Our guess is it will be Warner Bros. with Aquaman 2. As we just said, Disney laid down a pattern here, so it’s a bit more difficult for them to move. If we were to guess, Aquaman 2 will move up to sometime in early to mid-November. This will give it a shot at the Thanksgiving window which it should do well in.
At this point, with Disney’s ever-growing slate of films, it’s going to be just about impossible to avoid some form of competition from the House of Mouse. It’s going to be more about minimizing the potential damage that they will do instead.
There’s every chance Warner Bros. won’t blink, but there are sure to be some internal discussions going on soon if they haven’t happened already.
