Black Widow Release Date Reportedly Won’t Be Pushed Back

Coronavirus fears will not stop Natasha Romanoff from making her solo Marvel feature debut this May, according to a new report.

Deadline confirms that Disney currently has no plans to push back the release of Black Widow following news earlier this week that Daniel Craig’s highly anticipated James Bond swansong, No Time To Die, would be moving to November from its planned April slot.

Due to movie theaters closing in international markets where films like Black Widow stand to make a huge chunk of change during their global rollout, some had wondered whether Disney would follow suit in making its first MCU instalment since last summer’s Spider-Man: Far From Home – and its first fully-controlled project since Avengers: Endgame broke box office records earlier in 2019 – wait for the escalating coronavirus panic to pass, but apparently it will be “business as usual” when it comes to imminent studio release plans pretty much across the board, with May’s F9 and June’s Wonder Woman 1984 also not budging.

“If theaters aren’t closing in North America, I don’t know why you would pull your movie,” Comscore Senior Media Analyst Paul Dergarabedian told the site, but admitted that “studios will have to be responsive, nimble and willing to move titles around if need be.”

Dergarabedian cited Blumhouse and Leigh Whannell’s surprise horror hit The Invisible Man as a reason why studios won’t be feeling too cautious about moving release dates around just yet.

“The Invisible Man overperformed; people went to the movies and that was after plenty of headlines about the coronavirus,” he explained. “Since then there’s been more cases reported in North America and therefore this weekend if Onward, The Way Back and Emma perform as expected, that’s great news. And let’s keep in mind, not a single movie theater in North America is closed due to this situation. People are still going to the multiplex.”

As it stands, Black Widow is set to open on May 1, with a lot of fans very curious about the ultimate nature of Marvel’s new standalone action flick. While Cate Shortland’s movie is indeed a prequel that takes place around the time of Captain America: Civil War when a lot of the Avengers were still on the run, it will be interesting to see if, or how, the story changes the MCU timeline, and Marvel mastermind Kevin Feige has teased there are things that Natasha does in Infinity War and Endgame that we’ll see “in a new light” once we’ve witnessed Black Widow for ourselves.

More on any future release date changes as we hear them, coronavirus-related or not.