"The King's Man" Release Date Moved

[Bobby Henderson]

Does anyone know what's going on with The King's Man movie release? During recent visits to the local theater I've seen a really large poster of The King's Man in one of the display cases. The poster clearly listed "February 14, 2020" as the release date in the bottom center of the one sheet. But I've seen little if anything in terms of advance marketing for the prequel/origin story to Kingsmen. A teaser and trailer have been made for the movie, but I haven't seen any TV commercials, online ads or other stuff like that. With it being the eve of Valentine's Day 2020 I gave Rotten Tomatoes' web site a look to find out more info on it. With the lack of advertising I was almost anticipating a horrible tomato meter score for the movie. But then it turns out the release date has been pushed all the way out to September 18. What's up with that?

[Mike Blakesley]

I found this paragraph about it on Deadline, but it doesn't give a reason. I expect Disney figured it wasn't really a Valentine's Day type of movie?

Matthew Vaughn’s The King’s Man, which is already being promoted in theaters, is a prequel to his Kingsmen series starring Ralph Fiennes. It moves out of February 14, 2020, and all the way to September 18, 2020 against Paramount’s Michael B. Jordan Tom Clancy movie Without Remorse and Sony’s untitled Lord and Miller animation project.

I know they've moved a lot of titles around in the wake of the Fox acquisition. Another was Artemis Fowl which was supposed to come out last August but was pushed into May of this year.

[Bobby Henderson]

Whenever I hear of a movie's release date being pushed back by 6 months that's usually not a good sign. It makes me think they have to do re-shoots and more post production in an attempt to fix a very lame story. But to be fair, Titanic was one of those movies, originally set to be a Summer movie but pushed back into Winter. Didn't make any difference. The movie still slayed at the box office. The first Kingsmen movie was released a day before Valentine's Day in 2015. The first sequel was a fall release two years later. I'm not sure what to think of this specific situation. Not that it matters all that much.

[Scott Jentsch]

I updated our release date for The King's Man on November 19, 2019, so the change must have come through around that time. I'm not sure if it was through our data feed that we receive, or that I saw something from the studio, or an article on the various trade publication sites.

It's unfortunate that the theater you attended didn't think to put something over the date with the new info. Unfortunately, the movie's Facebook page has gone dormant since October 3, 2019. That page still says February 2020, so it must have been abandoned when the Disney acquisition effects kicked in. I finally found an updated version of the poster artwork on the movie's web site, which still promotes the 2nd trailer, which has the February 14, 2020 release date. It would be nice if they were to update their information for exhibitors and the press...

This movie seems to be falling through the cracks. Maybe some staffer somewhere will finally realize that they aren't doing themselves any favors by having outdated and/or incomplete information.