James Bond has coronavirus

Apparently, James Bond doesn't think April is a very good time to die.

November would be much better.

As you've surely heard by now, the release of Daniel Craig's "last" James Bond movie (didn't we hear that two movies ago?) has been postponed due to COVID-19. No Time to Die was supposed to come out in April, but now Cary Fukunaga's film will debut in November instead.

Maybe that would have been a better time anyway -- more consistent with the last few Bond releases -- but the reasons for it make me uncomfortable. It threatens to set a bad precedent and to screw up our whole movie year.

What if every studio thinks it's not going to make enough money on its movie by releasing it during a coronavirus panic? It'll be a pretty shit summer movie season, then. (Even more shit than it already appears to be, I should say.)

I get that financial considerations must be, er, considered when you are talking about a movie that has cost the studio at least $200 million in terms of both budget and advertising. Whether those are the actual figures for No Time to Die or not, they represent a good estimate for movies of that calibre, probably even on the conservative side.

But I kind of feel like earnings are relative, right? A movie studio has a lot of money, so in this day and age, a flop will rarely bankrupt it. The most important function of a flop, in practical terms, seems to be to determine whether this type of a movie is a hit with audiences, worth making again in the future. The actual box office total should be graded on a curve, relative to other movies released at the same time, not held out as some kind of absolute.

Which would work if all the studios just went ahead with their current release schedule.

But that's not going to happen, because UA/Universal/MGM have already balked. They've already messed up the playing field.

Let's talk about No Time to Die in comparison to April's other big action movie, which so far has not been postponed: Black Widow. If both movies came out in April and made $50 million less domestically than we might have expected, we'd still have a good idea of their success related to each other. We'd still be able to write think pieces, for example, on whether we're stuck in our old-world obsessions with male action heroes, or whether we can get behind female action heroes just as easily.

Now, though, the whole equation has been thrown off. If Black Widow flops, we won't know if it's because of coronavirus, or because audiences don't like female action heroes, or just because Cate Shortland is a bad filmmaker (my vote is for the last one).

No Time to Die, though, could be exchanging the devil it knows for the devil it doesn't know. What if we are even more afraid of each others' germs in November than we are now?

I hope studios don't start cancelling the movie season. And it won't just be the tentpole movies that get moved, in theory. Every movie is judged by its own expected success, and a movie that needs to earn $10 million at the U.S. box office to be considered a winner may be just as concerned about recouping its production costs as the latest James Bond -- just as concerned about proving to investors they have invested their money correctly.

I don't know how it's all going to shake out, but I don't like it.

Meanwhile, people in Melbourne are buying up all the available toilet paper. Seriously.