LOOKS PROMISING
After last summer’s cavalcade of crap, this year promises more hits, variety
An optimist would say that the recordbreaking success of superhero epic
Avengers: Infinity War is a great start to the summer 2018 movie season and a sign of good things to come.
A pessimist would say it’s all downhill from Infinity War. No other movie is likely to top its global box-office haul, which will hit the $1-billion (U.S.) mark sometime this weekend in record time, 10 or 11 days after release, with more moolah to come. It’s bound to be not just the most popular movie of the summer, but also the year. And remember, this is the year that’s already had another blockbuster — Black Panther — break the billion-dollar barrier. Fortunately for moviegoers, the optimists appear to be right — on paper, at least.
Prospects for warm-weather moviegoing this year are significantly better than they were in 2017, a year many distributors and exhibitors would like to forget.
The cavalcade of crap foisted upon an unsuspecting public last summer included The Mummy, Transformers: The Last Knight, The Dark Tower, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, Baywatch, The Emoji Movie and much more. Two of these films, The Mummy and Transformers: The Last Knight, now rank on my personal all-time Top 10 worst films list.
They were part of a distressing run of half-baked sequels, prequels and reboots that looked bad even from the trailers, which are supposed to get you excited by hiding all the bad bits and highlighting the good ones.
Summer 2017 was also overburdened with testosterone flicks, notwithstanding the success of blockbuster actioner Wonder Woman and comedy surprise Girls Trip.
The situation is much better this year, says Ellis Jacob, the president and CEO of Cineplex Entertainment, Canada’s largest movie chain.
“The summer film slate looks very strong and offers something for everyone,” he told journalists in a conference call this week.
Jacob has more than the usual reason for wanting his prediction to come true, because Cineplex saw a 9.3-percent dip in theatre attendance in the first quarter of this year. He blames it mainly on “weaker film product,” a situation partially mitigated by the success of Black Panther and Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle.
Jacob named 10 titles he think will do particularly well at the box office in the weeks ahead: Deadpool 2 ( May 18); Solo: A Star Wars Story ( May 25); Ocean’s 8 (June 8); Incredibles 2 (June 15); Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (June 22); Ant-Man and the Wasp (July 6); Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation (July 13); Skyscraper (July 13); Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (July 20); and Mission: Impossible — Fallout (July 27).
To be sure, this list includes the usual suspects of maledominated action pics, among them the latest Star Wars spinoff ( Solo), yet another Dwayne Johnson chestpounder ( Skyscraper) and a Tom Cruise stuntfest ( Mission: Impossible — Fallout).
But there’s some welcome variety in Ocean’s 8, an allfemale take on the caper comedy; a long-awaited sequel to a family superheroes comedy — and one of Pixar’s best creations — in Incredibles 2; and a sequel to a much-loved musical sensation, Mamma Mia!, that will please an adult audience often underserved by multiplex offerings.
“I’m really excited about this summer,” says Grae Drake, senior editor for Rotten Tomatoes, the leading movie-review online aggregator.
“As a movie fan, I am super pumped. I think that we are getting a really good mix of returning movies and (also) a couple of weird originals that I’m really excited about. I always want to see a little something new, but at the same time I feel like it’s not quite summer if I’m not watch- ing a bunch of people run away from dinosaurs.”
Her choice of “weird originals” include Morgan Neville’s Won’t You Be My Neighbor? (June 8), a documentary about children’s entertainer Fred Rogers, a film which Drake calls “sanity in an insane world” and a hit at Sundance and currently at Hot Docs; and Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You, a surreal sci-fi racial satire, also from Sundance (and SXSW), that is due in theatres in July.
Also on her radar, as well as mine, are Ari Aster’s generational-curse horror film Hereditary (June 8), starring Toni Collette, which terrified Sundance and SXSW audiences; and David Robert Mitchell’s missing-girl thriller Under the Silver Lake (June 22), which premieres in the Palme d’Or competition at Cannes later this month.
Why does it feel like this summer will be better for movies than the summer of 2017? The trailers for many of the films look promising, but trailers are often misleading. Drake thinks there are other reasons for optimism.
“I think overall the movies this summer really feel like, if they’re from a franchise, they’re from franchises we really love,” she says in an interview. “The fact that Ocean’s 8 is coming out and everybody seems as interested to see Sandra Bullock and Cate Blanchett and all those fantastic women, just as much as they were George Clooney and Brad Pitt, I think bodes really well for moviegoing in the immediate future. It really lifts my spirits.”
She’s also excited about Solo, premiering at Cannes, in which Alden Ehrenreich plays a younger version of Star Wars flyboy Han Solo, a role made famous by Harrison Ford. Drake doesn’t consider herself an ardent Star Wars fan, but she likes that supporting stars in the film include two of her favourite TV stars: Emilia Clarke from Game of Thrones and Donald Glover from Atlanta.
Will the positive vibes last from now until September? That’s anybody guess. But optimists and pessimists can at least agree that the movie summer of 2018 could hardly be worse than the movie summer of 2017.