Warner Bros./Time Warner Inc. has announced that it would be moving Game Night from March 2, 2018 (against Bruce Willis' Death Wish and Jennifer Lawrence's Red Sparrow) to Feb. 23, 2018. The frankly terrific-looking comedy, starring the likes of Jason Bateman, Rachel McAdams, Kylie Bunbury (star of the sadly departed Pitch), Lamorne Morris (The New Girl), Kyle Chandler and Jesse Plemons, is just one of Warner Bros./Time Warner Inc.'s first big post-Justice League releases in the first two months of 2018. Point being, continuing the whole "Warner Bros. is more than Batman and Harry Potter" thread, the Dream Factory has an incredibly busy first third of 2018.
They've got two movies in January (12 Strong and Paddington 2), two movies in February (Clint Eastwood's 15:17 to Paris and Game Night) and three key biggies in March and April, which is probably why Game Night shifted to February. They've got the Alicia Vikander Tomb Raider reboot on March 16 and then Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One on March 30. Their biggie in April is Dwayne Johnson's Rampage (April 20). The summer is comparatively smaller-scale, as is the case with a number of studios this year.
They've got Melissa McCarthy's Life of the Party on May 11 (a slot that works great for smaller-scale, female-skewing summer counter-programmers) and the Bradley Cooper/Lady Gaga remake of A Star Is Born on May 18. June will bring Ocean's 8 (the all-female Ocean's 11 spinoff) and the Ed Helms comedy Tag, while July brings The Nun (another Conjuring Universe spinoff with a prized mid-July release date) and Teen Titans Go to the Movies! (potentially the best comic book superhero movie since The Dark Knight and a clear Best Picture frontrunner) on July 27.
Oddly enough, their biggest summer movie A) arrives in August and B) is more or less intended to crush it in China as opposed to North America. Jason Statham and Fan Bingbing fight a giant prehistoric dinosaur-shark in John Turteltaub's $150 million(!) and PG-13(boo!) The Meg on Aug. 10. Summer will end with Crazy Rich Asians on Aug 17, as the Constance Wu comedy is a top contender for the "Gosh, how could we have expected this to make so much money?!" champion of 2018.
Warner Bros.' busy year will cap off with the animated Smallfoot on Sept. 28, Andy Serkis' much-delayed Jungle Book: Origins on October 19, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald on Nov. 16 and finally James Wan's Aquaman on Dec. 21. Putting aside potential date shifts, late-in-the-game acquisitions and the like, Warner Bros./Time Warner Inc. will release 19 movies in 2018. Those three big March and April offerings will be about as important to the long-term game as the big three closing offerings, while they've got a bunch of smaller or old-school movie-movies in between.
This isn't to say that all of these films will be good or that they will all be hits, but the idea that a studio, any studio, should be defined by one big tentpole is silly. That's especially true when dealing with a studio that releases a whole bunch of theatrical offerings each year. And, with Tomb Raider, Ready Player One and Rampage sight unseen, I would argue that DC Films is really the only franchise which is causing them that much internal and external strife. And to the extent that I didn't want the studio to try to build such a "cinematic universe," it was because I wanted them to be known as the studio that releases Edge of Tomorrow, Gravity, Sully, Creed, The Conjuring and Wonder Woman, not the studio that keeps screwing up the DC Comics movies.
