Ghostbusters: Afterlife Delayed To 2021

I can't say this comes as much of a surprise. Variety has just reported that Ghostbusters: Afterlife has been moved from July 10, 2020 to March 5, 2021. On the positive side, this gives Jason and the crew more time to refine those special effects, make other tweaks, and do everything to make it as perfect as possible. Once this pandemic is over, of course.

I'm going to assume that any merchandise directly related to Afterlife will also be postponed until when the movie is finally released. The companies might still go through with anything related to the classic movies. Hasbro took pre-orders on the Plasma Series and The Real Ghostbusters figures. They could still go ahead and release those on time to fulfill those pre-orders, since other than the Neutrona Wand from the Plasma Series, those aren't directly tied in with Afterlife. The only issue is whether the stay-at-home orders, and needing materials from China, will affect the production of these items.

We'll just have to wait and see how things go. In the meantime, we always have the monthly comics from IDW. They may or may not be able to do any printed books (depending on whether print shops had to shut down due to stay-at-home orders), but they can certainly do digital books. A lot of the artists, I think, work from home anyway. They could publish new digital books and then do some trade paperbacks later on to collect the digital stuff into a print form. Compared to some other companies, they may have it fairly easy in this situation.

(Thanks to MrMichaelT for the tip on the release date announcement. Photo Credit: Aero Theater in Los Angeles, March 2020.)