In Laman's Terms: How Did The Toxic Release Date Wars of the 2010s Begin?

 

Pictured (from left to right): Warner Bros. and Disney executives skirmishing over claims to 2018 release dates, circa. 2013

In the 2010s, a new practice began emerging for major American movie studios: claiming release dates years in advance. It's not like studios had never been obsessed with release dates. Countless past projects had been rushed to meet release date demands, usually because of pre-established marketing commitments studios couldn't escape. But in the 2010s, this practice was taken to another level. Now studios were staking out release dates for untitled movies five or six years deep into the future! This policy has become so ingrained into the everyday news cycle of cinema that it can be easy to take for granted such a bizarre practice. Major corporations are laying claim to big dates well into the future for projects that may never happen! It's a paranoid process that especially reflected one particular studio throwing its weight around in the 2010s. Instead of just accepting this oddness as a facet of reality, why don't we explore the origins of this phenomenon that has the world with multiple untitled Warner Bros. and Disney tentpoles set for 2026?

It all began with animated movies. These projects often take three or four years to make (sometimes even more!). This lengthy creative process means studios are well-aware of, say, what their 2017 animated tentpoles will be before their live-action movies. The latter titles can start filming a year before their proposed release dates and still make a May/June/July etc. date. Animated films need to get the ball rolling much sooner. Still, before the 2010s, it was a bit rare to have studios publicly announce an animation outfit's slate years in advance. Disney provided an early exception to this phenomenon by making a big splashy announcement of its next four years of animated movies in 2008. However, this was mostly done to reassure stockholders that the John Lasseter/Ed Catmull era of Disney Animation was providing a steady slate of new titles. 

The fact that several of those announced titles (namely King of the Elves and Newt) never happened due to subsequent development issues seemed to temporarily halt Disney's plans to unveil Pixar movies far off in advance. 2012 Pixar projects Brave and Monsters University were confirmed back in 2010, two years before their initial planned releases. Meanwhile, fellow animation studio DreamWorks Animation was also getting leg-up on potential release dates by announcing its next three years of movies in 2009. The announcement of those titles features a detail reflecting how it was once incomprehensible to announce a release date without a specific film attached. In revealing that it planned to drop an unknown film in November 2012, DreamWorks Animation revealed a trio of potential gestating titles that could take that slot.

When did this practice begin to ramp up to include both live-action movies and almost exclusively untitled projects? The shift appears to have occurred in 2013. Granted, in 2011 Disney set release dates for a pair of untitled Marvel Studios movies for 2014. However, that was still within the three-year maximum timespan Pixar and DreamWorks Animation used to establish release date. 2013 was when Disney suddenly staked out eight release date slots between then and 2018 for untitled Disney Animation and Pixar releases. That's a massive five year gulf between the announcement and when those titles would premiere! Even given how long animated movies are in production, it's conceivable animated projects hadn't even been green-lit for those 2018 slots yet!

How did Disney go from setting titles up two or three in advance to five-year planning so quickly? The changing factor appears to have been The Avengers in 2012. That hit title had been the result of long-term planning (though, ironically, The Avengers was only given a release date three years before its original planned debut). Disney wanted to apply that methodology to every corner of its corporate empire. Plus, Disney and all other American studios were now altering their release slates drastically. 2013 was the year Hollywood learned to stop worrying and embrace the tentpole while eschewing mid-budget movies. Wall Street stockholders and risk-averse studio executives were now fixated on cinematic universes and franchise fare above all else. Such costly titles needed all the help they could get in recouping their costs...including getting prime release date real estate. A proper launchpad could mean the difference between debuting an Iron Man 3 or a 47 Ronin.

Disney kicked this trend off, but every studio soon got in on the game. A few weeks after Disney's announcement of its 2013-2018 animated movie slate, 20th Century Fox revealed a bevy of 2013-2018 release dates for untitled animated tentpoles. The freshness of this release strategy was apparent in a SlashFilm report on the latter news, which ended with the writer asking readers if they liked this new approach to establishing release dates. A new status quo had been established and this site wanted to get the feedback of its readers. In October 2014, this phenomenon arguably reached its peak (though it would by no means fizzle out subsequently) when Marvel Studios and Warner Bros./DC announced a slew of new superhero movies. The former company held a big event at the El Captain Theatre to reveal its features through Avengers: Endgame (then known as Avengers: Infinity War Part II) in May 2019. Meanwhile, Warner Bros. used a shareholders meeting to reveal its expansive slate of DC Comics adaptations through a Green Lantern Corps. title in the summer of 2020. Now studios were planning six years in advance!

Those two examples demonstrated the dark underbelly of an already creepy process. Disney and Warner Bros. were claiming release dates far in advance not just to spur on fanboy enthusiasm, but to also tell other studios to stay away. Rival companies knew years in advance not to tango with Captain America: Civil War or Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. These were movies apparently so big that they needed their release dates announced years beforehand. Who would want to open counterprogramming against that? As late as 2015, Ant-Man opened on the same day as Trainwreck. Save for the occasional instance of Trolls and Hacksaw Ridge opening against Doctor Strange, most MCU titles from 2016 onward opened against no other wide releases. Announcing these dates so far ahead of time made it seem like these slots belonged "exclusively" to Disney/Warner Bros. In the process, the days of counterprogramming against blockbusters withered away in the late 2010s, harming the box office in the process.

In the end, a bunch of these advanced release dates didn't live up to their grand ambitions. Amusingly, both of DC's planned 2020 movies never saw the light of day. Meanwhile, Disney's Marvel movies had to constantly shift release dates throughout the mid-2010s to account for new factors like Marvel Studios working on new Spider-Man movies. Then there was the COVID-19 pandemic, which shut down theaters and rendered most of these planned release dates null and void. Disney had exerted lots of power and control over movie theaters in the 2010s. But even the Mouse House couldn't stand up to a global health crisis that made the act of established release dates years in advance a punchline.

In the 10+ years since this practice began, Hollywood and moviegoers haven't really benefited from the normalization of making release dates even more important to mainstream studios. Infamous 2010s disasters like Independence Day: Resurgence and Justice League were rushed to meet hastily announced release dates. Meanwhile, non-tentpole titles (which simply can't establish release dates far in advance for a multitude of practical reasons) further suffered in this decade. Not only were studios already eschewing such projects, but now these movies were treated as afterthoughts by studios trying to set up new Hasbro/Valiant Comics/Robin Hood Cinematic Universe projects well into the 2020s. Ironically, its low-budget original movies like Get Out (which was only set for its February 2017 release date four months before it premiered!) prioritizing good writing over shareholder-friendly release dates which have endured from this decade. Those features will stick around in people's minds long after circa. 2013/2014 press releases about "untitled Disney films set for 2019" have long faded from memory.