2020 has been a topsy-turvy year, to put it gently. Due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, movie theaters closed across the U.S. for most of the spring/summer and have only operated at partial capacity since. As a result, the majority of films that were initially scheduled to open this year moved back to 2021 and the traditional summer movie season didn't happen. Now, perhaps fittingly, 2020 will end in an equally odd way -- with the summer movie season happening around the winter holidays, thanks to the release of Wonder Woman 1984 and Soul.
Prior to the pandemic, both Wonder Woman 1984 and Soul were slated to hit theaters in June 2020. That month has been a prosperous one for related films in the past, with Pixar's Inside Out and the first Wonder Woman doing strong business at the box office over that frame in 2015 and 2017, respectively. However, once it became clear a June debut wasn't feasible, Wonder Woman 1984 shuffled back to August and then October, while Soul moved to November. Both films are now set to stream on Christmas Day and will release theatrically in countries where their respective streaming services, HBO Max and Disney+, are not available.
December, of course, isn't an unusual time for studios to release big event titles. Movies like Aquaman, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle and four of the last five Star Wars films have opened in December since 2015. In the years before, Peter Jackson released both his Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies that month. That said, December is typically a frame when studios focus more on rolling out their prestige pics, like when Little Women, Just Mercy and 1917 bowed in theaters on Christmas Day a year ago. For that reason, it's unusual for there to be too many "summer movies" premiering on or around December 25.
By comparison, several movies that would have been perfect for the summer have released over the last week, ahead of Wonder Woman 1984 and Soul arriving. Both the Gerard Butler-led disaster thriller Greenland and the video game adaptation Monster Hunter, which comes from the Resident Evil star-director duo Milla Jovovich and Paul W.S. Anderson, were actually scheduled to open as part of the 2020 summer movie season, before the pandemic ultimately delayed them to December 18. The Bruce Willis sci-fi action/horror movie Breach also debuted that day, but would've likewise made more sense as a summer title.
This month will still see its share of prestige pics thanks to Netflix Originals like Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and The Midnight Sky, along with film festival darlings, like Nomadland, that are opening in select theaters to qualify for awards consideration. Even so, if Wonder Woman 1984 and Soul are successful, that would further demonstrate to Hollywood that audiences are happy to watch "summer movies" at any time of the year. This could subsequently have an effect on how studios schedule their films in the years to come, once the global box office begins to recover from 2020's historic drop-off in ticket sales.
Recent movies like Black Panther and Bad Boys for Life have already proven that summer-worthy event titles can become hits in traditionally slower moviegoing months, but those are still the exceptions and not the rule right now. Should this year's crop of December films perform well, it will only further encourage studios to continue experimenting with when they release their biggest movies outside of the lucrative summer months. It's yet another way both Wonder Woman 1984 and Soul could end up having a lasting impact on the industry in the future.