On the subject of Moana 2 and Mufasa being released too close together, next year Disney has:
May 23: Lilo and Stitch remake
June 13: Elio
The “original non-IP stories bomb” are already being written.
Yeah, that's cutting it awfully close, especially if
Lilo & Stitch is as big a hit as early enthusiasm for it suggests it can be.
Elio's home stretch ad campaign can't start until after
Lilo's.
And it opens the same day as the
How to Train Your Dragon remake.
And after releasing one Marvel film this year:
Feb: Captain America
May: Thunderbolts
July: Fantastic Four
There’s gonna be MCU oversaturation at some point. Only question is how much and when.
The inherent problem with the 2025 slate isn't so much oversaturation as much as that these are all B- and C-list characters, a far cry from mega-fan-favorites Deadpool & Wolverine. The sheer confidence shown by Sony in bumping back
Paddington in Peru's American release to the same day as
Captain America: Brave New World suggests they feel Cap is less of an adversary than
Dog Man (which the originally planned January 31st date would have put it up against); Disney probably shouldn't expect a strong family audience for that one.
Fantastic Four: First Steps is in effect running unopposed on its weekend, but...yeah, in the comics they're A-listers but they've performed B-level
at best in their previous cinematic incarnations. And even if the "fun" retro approached being promised comes through, they're shooting for the same crowd as James Gunn's
Superman , which opens just two weeks before (and already has a teaser). If that heads up up and away at the box office...not to mention that the week before
that Universal's unleashing a new
Jurassic World installment, which could hurt both. (Kids love them dinos!)