‘Shazam,’ ‘Aquaman’ Sequels Pushed Back by Warner Bros.

In a blow to the fall box office calendar, Warner Bros. announced that the DC blockbuster “Shazam: Fury of the Gods” will be pushed back from a December 2022 release to March 2023, taking a slot that once belonged to “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom,” which will be pushed back to Christmas Day 2023.

Warner Bros. also announced that “House Party” and “Evil Dead Rise,” initially greenlit as HBO Max releases, will now be theatrical releases that hits the big screen in December 9, 2022 and April 21, 2023 respectively. On the New Line horror front, the “Conjuring” film “The Nun 2” has been slated for a release on Labor Day weekend next year, while the Stephen King adaptation “Salem’s Lot” has been pulled from the slate while postproduction continues.

Earlier this year, Warner had swapped the release date spots for “Shazam 2” and “Aquaman 2,” with insiders telling TheWrap at the time that “Shazam 2” had finished postproduction while “Aquaman 2” was seeing a slowdown in its visual effects production due to high demand in the film industry from projects delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

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With this new slate change, the only remaining DC film on Warner’s 2022 slate is “Black Adam,” which is set for an Oct. 23 release. Meanwhile, the exit of “Shazam 2” from the holiday slate will likely be the gain of 20th Century’s “Avatar: The Way of Water,” as it now stands as the sole four-quadrant blockbuster on the holiday slate against the Universal/DreamWorks’ family film “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” and Sony’s Whitney Houston biopic “I Wanna Dance With Somebody.”

In the short term, having one less superhero film to close out the year will be a setback for movie theaters looking for a strong holiday season to counter what is shaping up to be a very poor third quarter, with overall totals for the box office sinking below $100 million since the end of July and not expected to rise again until late October.

But the move of “Evil Dead Rise” and “House Party” from HBO Max to theatrical will be an encouraging sign for theater execs, who have been waiting for new Warner CEO David Zaslav to make good on his promise to renew the studio’s focus on theatrical releases at a time when the number of films being released in theaters is still below pre-pandemic levels.

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“Evil Dead Rise” in particular could overperform given its popularity among horror fans, with series creator Sam Raimi and original star Bruce Campbell serving as executive producers. The last “Evil Dead” film, a 2013 reboot directed by Fede Alvarez and released by Sony, grossed $97.5 million worldwide against a $17 million budget.

As for DC, “Shazam: Fury of the Gods” now sits in a March 17 release slate where it will try to improve on the $140.4 million domestic/$366 million worldwide total that the first “Shazam” earned in April 2019. The film will be released one week before Lionsgate’s “John Wick: Chapter 4,” but will have premium format support at least on opening weekend to help boost its numbers.

“Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom” will also get premium format support, though it is currently lined up to compete against Lucasfilm’s “Star Wars: Rogue Squadron,” Paramount’s next “Star Trek” film, and Sony’s sequel to “Ghostbusters: Afterlife.”

It is possible that one of those films may be pushed back in response to the arrival of “Aquaman 2,” especially considering that Lucasfilm head Patty Jenkins told Vanity Fair in May that “Rogue Squadron” had been “pushed aside” while director Patty Jenkins continued to work on the film’s script.