Musical Master wrote:
Hopefully by September/October the pandemic will have subsided a little bit for the slate of Fall-Winter 2020 films to open as scheduled. As for this I'm highly excited for this movie because of the cast, crew and the photos look really good, Steven Spielberg said somewhere that this project has been in his head since 2002 so this should be quite special. As much as I think the 1961 version is a classic, I'm open for someone to do another adaption of the wonderful musical.
In The Heights hasn't chosen a new release date yet, but it would be cool if it opened in December as a counterpoint to West Side Story the same way back in 2014 when Annie and Into The Woods competed against each other.
Spielberg has also long wanted to direct a musical. That's why "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" begins with a Broadway-style musical number as he wanted to see if he had the chops to pull one off. "Hook" also came very close to being a musical and the few songs that appear in the movie (the one sung in the Peter Pan play at the start of the movie and the song sung by Peter's daughter on the pirate ship) were remnants of that idea. So I'm really happy and excited that he's now been able to fulfill this career-long dream of his.
As for "In the Heights", I can see Warner Brothers going for a release strategy similar to what they did with "A Star is Born" and "Joker", where it premieres at the autumn festivals (if any of them decide to still move forward and everything has calmed down at that point) and then opens in the beginning of October.