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‘Minions: Rise of Gru’ gets a new release date
The statement on Wednesday came as Universal began to reshuffle its release schedule because of the far-reaching effects of the coronavirus pandemic. Gru’s rise stepped off its global release
scheduled for late June in some offshore markets and domestically for July 3. It is now scheduled for July 2, 2021, taking the slot belonging to Sing 2, which in turn is now bound for Christmas 2021 (in-house December 22). Accordingly, Universal moved Wicked off its 2021 holiday debut, and the film remains without a date for now. There are further victims of the coronavirus pandemic, as Illumination’s Mac Guff studio in Paris was temporarily shut down in abidance with France’s current lockdown.
Universal has already moved the offshore release of James Bond pic No Time to Die this year, shifting the release of F9 to Easter weekend April 2, 2021. Sony shuffled a lot of news on Tuesday.
No studio is immune. As for The Rise of Gru, the Despicable Me movies of Illumination in 2017 became the worldwide top-sized animated film series. Released in 2016, Sing
made $634 M worldwide. Meanwhile, Director Stephen Daldry’s Wicked is based on the
Broadway musical hit which has won three Tony Awards. We realized that 2020 wasn’t set to be nearly as high as 2019 in terms of gross; it was expected to be a year of transformation.
But none ever felt it would be as harsh as this