Captain Marvel, other heroes to light up screens
Brie Larson’s star turn is one of 10 tasty coming attractions; another is the long-awaited return of “Dumbo.”
The next year is going to be spent talking a lot about “Avengers: Endgame” in April, “Toy Story 4” in June and “Star Wars: Episode IX” in December. Just give us the tickets already, because we’re beyond stoked. But there are many more intriguing entries coming in 2019, from revamped Disney classics and awesome assassins to the return of one lovable monstrous lizard and Marvel’s first headlining superheroine. ❚ Here are exclusive looks at the 10 movies we can’t wait to see in the months ahead:
1. ‘Captain Marvel’ (March 8)
Before Brie Larson’s energy-blasting heroine plays a role in “Endgame,” Carol Danvers gets a proper introduction as the fighter pilot/space warrior in a 1990s-era solo adventure. “It’s so cool to play a superhero wearing a Nine Inch Nails T-shirt, ripped jeans and Doc Martens,” Larson says. A protagonist who needs to figure out her own mysterious backstory (plus fight shapeshifting Skrulls), Carol’s “not this perfect ideal of a woman. She’s my perfect ideal because she’s flawed and she owns those and learns to work with them, and is making mistakes over the course of this movie finding herself – figuring out her past, but also discovering her own strength and power.”
2. ‘Us’ (March 15)
“Get Out” writer/director Jordan Peele promises a “scarier” experience with his new horror film, which follows a family (Lupita Nyong’o, Winston Duke, Shahadi Wright Joseph and Evan Alex) tormented by mysterious, creepy
versions of themselves during a beach getaway. “As a country that seems obsessed with the idea of the outsider coming to take what’s ours, it felt appropriate to tell a story where the enemies have our face and the invader is not what we expect or tend to fear,” Peele says, adding that he’s paying homage to all his heroes: “Hitchcock, Spielberg, Kubrick – everybody’s in there in some way.”
3. ‘Dumbo’ (March 29)
In Tim Burton’s live-action take on the Disney classic, the flying elephant in the title has a way of bringing out the fundamental truth of every human character. In the case of Holt Farrier (Colin Farrell), the horse showman who lost both his wife and left arm while fighting in World War I, he gets his life back on track taking care of newborn Dumbo with his two children. The little circus elephant awakens Holt “as a man who can trust in sweetness and who doesn’t just see the world through the
lens of the violence and the inhumanity that he observed while he was away at the war,” Farrell says. “That’s a huge thing.”
4. ‘Shazam!’ (April 5)
The main man of DC’s comedic superhero movie is right in star Zachary Levi’s wheelhouse. “I’ve always been drawn to characters with big hearts, or they’re drawn to me,” says Levi, who plays the musclebound result when 14-year-old Billy Batson (Asher Angel) utters the magic word “Shazam!” Like “Big” meets “Superman,” the movie taps into universal childhood imagination. “At some point, we all thought, ‘If I just believe hard enough, then I can fly or run across the water or read somebody’s thoughts.’ This is a kid getting to live out those dreams. It’s a tale as old as time but of all the superhero movies, it has yet to be told.”
5. ‘Hellboy’ (April 12)
The half-demon, all-sarcastic superhero gets a reboot with David Harbour (replacing Ron Perlman in the role) wearing cut-off horns and the Right Hand of Doom as Hellboy battles supernatural threats like the deadly Blood Queen (Milla Jovovich) while also trying to fit into society. “I love that he is sort of destined to bring about the apocalypse, and yet he himself just wants to be, like, a good guy,” Harbour says. The new film leans into blood, guts and a morally complicated hero. “Hellboy is fundamentally a sweet-hearted guy but also a big old killer, just whacking people. We explore the horror of what it must be like to be from hell and to struggle to find your place among human beings.”
6. ‘John Wick: Chapter 3’ (May 17)
Keanu Reeves’ semi-retired assassin just can’t catch a break, with a global community of killers out to get him as Wick travels from New York to Morocco and back, seeking any help he can find to survive. “I’m a big fan of Joseph Campbell’s mythologies of the hero and what he would have defined as the theater of pain, or sometimes we call it ‘The Die Hard Conundrum’: We just to like to beat the (stuffing) out of our heroes,” director Chad Stahelski says, promising that more of Wick’s origins will be revealed. “If you choose that kind of lifestyle, you’re going to be pretty beat up. So we like John Wick to suffer and think Keanu loves for John Wick to suffer, too.”
7. ‘Aladdin’ (May 24)
Guy Ritchie’s musical redo is a “bigger and brighter” take on the Disney cartoon, says Naomi Scott, who herself is adding dimension to Princess Jasmine by emphasizing the strength and intelligence of the iconic character she loved growing up. Jasmine’s arc obviously involves falling for street rat Aladdin (Mena Massoud): “They’re the perfect partnership because they both need each other and teach each other.” But it’s also about “finding her voice” and wanting the best for the people of Agrabah. “She gradually finds the courage to speak out against injustice, and that’s kind of her objective from the start of the movie: ‘I see these people, I love them.’ ”
8. ‘Godzilla: King of the Monsters’ (May 31)
When he was 4, director Michael Dougherty says his primary “security blanket” was a Godzilla toy. “I would take him to church. That’s how much I loved him.” And with the new sequel, he’s putting the “god” in the “Godzilla” franchise, bringing back the likes of three-headed golden dragon Ghidorah and winged moth Mothra from the old Japanese monster films. In the movie’s world, “they’re not just big dumb animals. They were worshipped back in the day,” Dougherty says. The titanic creatures once co-existed with humans, yet when they and Godzilla rise once again to find out who truly rules in “King,” that understanding between man and monster has been forgotten. “There’s a fantastical element that comes into that. It’s not just pure science fiction.”
9. ‘Rocketman’ (May 31)
Taron Egerton truly embraced all things Elton John in this musical fantasy inspired by the pop legend’s life from the late 1950s to the end of the ’80s, singing about a dozen of his most famous numbers and wearing a variety of ultra-flamboyant looks. “I wear a Queen Elizabeth I costume at one point; that was a lot of fun. There’s a lot of hot pants and not much else. It was a baptism of fire,” Egerton says. As much as it’s based in reality, he adds, “Rocketman” also uses heightened fantasy elements to make the story “magical, kind of trippy, a bit otherworldly and quite dark.”
10. ‘The Kitchen’ (Sept. 20)
In the 1970s-set crime drama, Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish and Elisabeth Moss play wives who take over the Irish Mob in Hell’s Kitchen when their husbands are nabbed by the FBI. Putting women in positions they’re not normally found became a theme, from its comedic actresses to a female director making her debut in a male-dominated genre. “Don’t underestimate people” was the main idea for Andrea Berloff, adding that “Thelma & Louise” proved influential with “two really tough women who are ‘criminals’ and yet we love them.” Berloff was “raised and reared” on Mob movies, “so they’re in there somewhere, but I really wanted to find my own voice in my own way.”