Coronavirus has done something Thanos couldn’t: Stopped the inexorable march of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

According to CNN, Disney has indefinitely postponed Black Widow from its previously scheduled May 1 release date. The film, starring Scarlett Johansson, was meant to be the first film in Phase Four of the MCU — and the kickoff of the annual summer movie season. Now the MCU is delayed for the foreseeable future, and the summer movie season will be severely abridged, if it happens at all.

Disney has already postponed the release of Mulan; today they also postponed two smaller films, The Personal History of David Copperfield and The Woman in the Window. None of these films have new release dates at this time. One imagines everything is on hold for now, and for a long while.

While many fans will want Marvel to release Black Widow straight to Disney+, unless this stretches on for a very long time, that concept seems unlikely. Putting the film up for free to subscribers means a lost of hundreds of millions of dollars for Marvel. They could theoretically release the film on VOD, in a manner similar to NBCUniversal preparing to release Trolls World Tour on VOD for $19.99 next month, but the price needed to make it profitable to release a massive movie like Black Widow that way might be too steep for customers, particularly in this new reality we are all entering into.

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