YEAR AT A GLANCE
And that’s far from all the excitement coming your way in 2021. Here are the other films and shows to mark on your calendar, season by season*
SPRING
Bada bing! The Sopranos gets a big-screen prequel, featuring a young Tony in a supporting role, with
The Many Saints Of Newark (12 March)… Jared Leto plays a vampire and probably guzzled blood between takes for Morbius (19 March)… Marvel up-and-comers Sam and Bucky take centre stage for The Falcon And The Winter Soldier (19 March)… Zack Snyder tries again with, well, Zack Snyder’s Justice League (March TBC)... Daniel Craig wears his final tuxedo in No Time To Die
(2 April)… The big-eared beasts are back in
A Quiet Place Part II (23 April)… And Kate Winslet gets gritty as a small-town Pennsylvania cop in HBO drama Mare Of Easttown (TBC).
SUMMER
Natasha Romanoff is dead, yet here she is in Black Widow (7 May)… A lizard monster and a big gorilla punch each other in Godzilla Vs. Kong (May TBC)… Emma Stone covets Dalmatians in Disney prequel Cruella (28 May)… Tom Hiddleston’s mischievous meddler finally gets the spotlight he craves in Loki (May TBC)... Tom Hardy goes up against Woody Harrelson in Venom: Let There Be Carnage (25 June)… Marvel gets mystical for
Shang-chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings (9 July)… Tom Holland jumps over things in Uncharted
(16 July)… Lin-manuel Miranda’s debut stage musical gets supersized for In The Heights
(30 July)… A gang of terrible people and some sort of shark thing gang up for James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad (6 August)… Candyman, the villain who appears if you say “Candyman” three times, returns in Candyman (damn it!) (27 August)… Wes Anderson turns his precisely symmetrical gaze onto print media with The French Dispatch
(TBC)… Zack Snyder again, this time marshalling a legion of zombies in Netflix’s Army Of The Dead
(TBC)... And more televisual tension is on the cards for the return of The Morning Show (TBC).
AUTUMN
Kenneth Branagh’s Poirot moustache lives again in Death On The Nile (17 September)… We finally get to see Denis Villlenueve’s take on Dune (1 October)… Pretending Cats never happened, Jennifer Hudson sings her heart out for Aretha Franklin biopic Respect (8 October)… Ridley Scott returns with 14th-century abuse drama The Last Duel (TBC)… And the world goes upside down again for Stranger Things: Season 4 (TBC).
WINTER
Tom Hanks plays powerful music manager Tom Parker for Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis (5 November)… Director Chloé Zhao puts together a really quite sizeable team for Marvel’s Eternals (5 November)… Tom Cruise takes stunts to kamikaze levels in Mission: Impossible 7 (19 November)… Ridley Scott is back with his second film in months with true-crime drama Gucci (26 November)… Steven Spielberg gifts us his first musical with West Side Story (10 December)… We may be getting a multiverse extravaganza with Tom Holland’s untitled third solo Spider-man (17 December)…neo and Trinity return in The Matrix 4 (22 December), but will the leather trench coats be back too?... Jodie Whittaker’s Time Lord returns for the 13th (or 38th, if you’re old-school) season of Doctor Who (TBC)… and Mandalorian spin-off The Book Of Boba Fett (December) looks set to stream close to the third season of our favourite bounty-hunting father figure’s adventures, as The Mandalorian hopefully returns at the end of the year (TBC).
* Some of these are Empire’s best guess because, well, who knows these days?