‘Death On The Nile’ will be out by valentine’s Day 2022 and Armie Hammer is still in it. What I mean is Disney isn’t attempting to keep Hammer hidden from the public eye. Hammer has been accused of emotional abuse, manipulation, and compulsion by many women for about a year; in April, a woman who only provided her name as Effie accused Hammer of rape. Hammer rejected the charges, but his William Morris agency fired him and he opted out of a number of film and television projects, including Jennifer Lopez’s Shotgun Wedding and Paramount+’s The Godfather series.

In Disney’s defense, when the unsettling charges surfaced, Death on a Nile had been completed for more than a year, putting Disney in a difficult position. The film’s release had already been postponed because to COVID-19, which was initially scheduled for 2020.

When the allegations against Hammer surfaced, Disney explored a number of choices (Call Me By Your Name, The Social Network). According to a source close to the events, one of those ideas involved reshooting the film with a new star to replace Hammer’s character. After Kevin Spacey was accused of sexual assault, which he denied, Ridley Scott, one of the producers of Death on the Nile, reshot All the Money in the World in 2017. Eventually, Christopher Plummer took over for Kevin Spacey.

But, because of the epidemic and the ensemble cast, that wasn’t possible for a film of this scope. Due to COVID, reuniting all of the actors would have been nearly impossible.(Annette Bening, Russell Brand, Ali Fazal, Dawn French, Rose Leslie, Emma Mackey, Sophie Okonedo, and Jennifer Saunders all star in Death on the Nile.)

According to an insider, another alternative would have been to employ digital technology to edit or alter the film, but given the magnitude of the ensemble and detailed storyline, this would have been equally difficult.

In the end, the studio opted to leave the film alone and go ahead with a full theatrical release. A source claims that putting Death on the Nile on hold or selling it to a streaming service would have been a disservice to the enormous cast and crew. Disney also didn’t want to give up the franchise that 20th Century Fox had created in collaboration with the Christie family. Murder on the Orient Express, which was also directed and starred Branagh, was a sleeper blockbuster at the picture office in 2017, grossing almost $353 million worldwide for 20th Century Fox.