As the summer 2018 movie season somehow already draws nearer, it’s become standard practice that a handful of films will see their dates pushed up, pushed back, or delayed entirely. However, the 20th Century Fox arm of Marvel productions has now made substantial changes to its release slate over the next two years.
On the heels of this afternoon’s news that Channing Tatum’s Gambit standalone is once again in search of a director, The Hollywood Reporter has already confirmed that the long-gestating project will now be released on June 7th, 2019, pushed back from February 14th. Principal photography was originally set to begin in March, and it’s unclear when the film will now start shooting as Fox hunts for a new filmmaker.
Perhaps more surprising is the delay of The New Mutants, Josh Boone’s horror-centric X-Men outing, which was originally set to open on April 13th of this year but has now been bumped all the way back to February 22nd, 2019, likely to fill the hole left in the studio’s schedule when Gambit was moved.
In a bit of slightly better news, Deadpool 2 has been moved up two weeks to May 18th. It joins a crowded May at the box office, now arriving just two weeks after Avengers: Infinity War and one week before Solo: A Star Wars Story, but with the latter’s release being met with increasing skepticism as the weeks tick on without so much as a trailer, this could prove to be a canny move on Fox’s part.
