Dune: Part 2 delayed into 2024 as studios really start to panic

The Alliance Of Motion Picture And Television Producers hasn’t had an especially great week (we’ll give you a moment to tune your tiny violins or to comically dab the fake tears from your eyes). Just yesterday we reported that the long-awaited return to the bargaining table with the Writers Guild Of America was apparently just a scheme to try and force the members into turning on their union—to make it seem like the negotiating committee was simply being obstinate in the face of a supposedly good offer from the studios. The WGA even said that, instead of a negotiation, the AMPTP returned to bargain with “a lecture about how good their single and only counteroffer was.”

Like most of the AMPTP’s moves, it seemed to do little more than reenergize that striking workers, and now the studios are willfully suffering the consequences of their own refusal to meet the demands of the writers and actors they depend on so much: As reported by Deadline, Warner Bros. Discovery has officially decided to bump Dune: Part Two from November 3 all the way to March 15, 2024, and not only is it definitely because of the strikes, but it’s also definitely a desperation move that shows that the studios are nervous.

This isn’t a movie coming out in a month or even two months. It was coming out in November. It already had trailers with the old date attached to Oppenheimer and other big movies this summer. Delaying it now means those trailers were basically a waste for WBD, and it also means that the studio doesn’t have much faith that the strike will be resolved by November. But that will just make the studio even more desperate to get deals for the writers and actors before March, so while the studio is doing what it can to salvage the potential box office for the movie (because Zendaya and Timothée Chalamet can’t do any promotion for the film while on strike), it is also only giving more leverage to the unions by doing this.

Basically, this is proof that the studios are in trouble, and they know it. However, other big WBD movies like Wonka, Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom, and The Color Purple will hold their release dates in December, which could mean that the studio has more faith in ending the strike by then, but Deadline also says that exhibitors—theater owners—have made it “loud and clear that they need these movies like air” after the COVID closures. So, perhaps delaying Dune 2 was the one move the studio felt it could make, while a mass-delay would’ve been more disruptive than it could handle.

Either way, all this does is delay the inevitable and treat the symptom but not the cause. The unions aren’t going to cave because movies get delayed, but the studios will have to cave if they keep delaying movies.