A couple of things happen in the earlier weeks of May. The sun shines profusely and people flock to the cinemas because, as of the first weekend in May, the spring-summer blockbuster season officially begins. When you look at how movies are released throughout the year, it’s as if the studios put films out on a rotating wheel. January/February you get the formulaic rom-coms and chick-flicks, March/April you get a comedy, a low-grade horror flick or two, September and October is dead-time, November and December comes Oscar season – but beginning with May and ending in the second or third week of August, you have the blockbuster season, and that is what we are going to take a look at.
It will start strong with Marvel’s Iron Man 2, where Robert Downey Jr. will be returning to his prolific comeback role as playboy-genius-millionaire Tony Stark. He charmed audiences two summers past in 2008, and I have no doubts that he and the Marvel team will do a great job again. Plus it will be exciting to see Mickey Rourke headline as the new villain, Whiplash. You can anticipate high opening weekend numbers. The first one opened with a whopping $100 million back in 2008, so this sequel could potentially break The Dark Knight’s record for the highest opening weekend gross.
By taking the same weekend they took ten years ago with Gladiator, Ridley Scott’s new take on Robin Hood opens on May 14 – featuring Russell Crowe in the title role, who has crash dieted and ran himself ragged to return to prominence as an action star. Judging from the trailer, I thought it looked absurd and awesome at the same time – I hope it performs to be the latter. Whether the studio is intending for this picture to be an Oscar winner like Gladiator or just a popcorn flick is beyond me.
As for what else is up in store for May, the latest entry in the Shrek franchise, Shrek For-(Four, get the pun)-ever After is opening May 21. While Shrek The Third struggled to find critical acclaim in its 2007 release, it easily gained box office success grossing nearly $900 million worldwide (mainly in international grosses) – so there’s no doubt as to why DreamWorks pushed out a fourth one for three years later. If this one conquers like the last one did, it will be another franchise that is critic-proof a la Michael Bay’s Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.
An interesting film that could answer a lot of questions in the moviegoers’ minds is The Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, starring Jake Gyllenhaal in the titular role. I saw the trailer and had my doubts. However, it is the first time that a movie based on a video-game has received a large budget (reportedly, the production budget has reached $150 million), a big-name star, a relatively respected director (Mike Newell is quite prominent in England and North America), a prolific producer (Jerry Bruckheimer, whose films, whether good or bad always manage to break box office records) and the Walt Disney Company to give in their stamp.
From the looks of it, it’s a step up from the video-game based movie adaptations we’re used to like the infamous Uwe Boll films, or other low-grade barely B-movie attempts like Hitman, Far Cry, Resident Evil, or Postal – just to name a few. If Prince of Persia does well – both critically and commercially – we could be looking at a whole lot of video-game movies to come, like Halo, Bioshock, and others – and hopefully, they will be put into the hands of good/great directors. If it performs poorly, than it will probably be a long time before we see a big-budget movie come out that’s based on a game.
The Sex and the City sequel concludes May and enters into June, where blockbusters will be thrown at us left and right. You have Get Him to the Greek, the Forgetting Sarah Marshall spin-off featuring Russell Brand and Jonah Hill leading an all-star cast featuring all kinds of popular musicians like P-Diddy as himself. There is the TV series re-make surfacing soon, The A-Team, which starring Liam Neeson, The Hangover’s Bradley Cooper, and last-year’s newly-famous District 9 South-African star Sharlto Copley could be a potential hit. Rivaling The A-Team that same weekend will be the re-boot of The Karate Kid, which starring Will Smith’s son Jaden and Jackie Chan, is being directed by Harold Zwart – whose film credits include The Pink Panther 2 and Agent Cody Banks – I do not anticipate greatness, and I hope The A-Team will be victorious, but the Smiths are box-office gold.
The next week comes my most anticipated film of the summer, the long-awaited Toy Story 3, which, featuring the same voice cast led by Tom Hanks and Woody Allen, seems to be a sure-fire hit. Taking advantage of new technologies like the improvements in animation and the popularity of 3-Dimensional cinema, the Pixar Team has never let us down – and Toy Story 3 has the potential to be an actually good third installment in a franchise. That same weekend comes along the dark, R-Rated graphic novel adaptation Jonah Hex, featuring actor-du-jour Josh Brolin in the lead and eye-candy actress Megan Fox.
On June 25, the new competition will be between Adam Sandler’s new vehicle with frequent collaborator Dennis Dugan, Grown Ups, featuring an ensemble cast including Kevin James, Chris Rock, David Spade and Rob Schneider. Also opening that weekend is Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz in Knight and Day. The film falls under my least-favorite genre – rarely has an action comedy elevated beyond light-hearted studio dribble. It does have a few things going for it however, with worth-watching director James Mangold who brought us the recent well-crafted re-make of 3:10 to Yuma and the emotionally-investing Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, and a hard-working Tom Cruise who is trying to get himself back into the center of the spotlight.
It ends in June and picks up on July 4th weekend – which generally is the destination for most summer tent-pole releases. Occupying this elusive weekend is the third entry in the Twilight saga – Eclipse. Like other franchises, the Twilight films happen to be critic proof, something we could attribute to perhaps the superficial appearances of the cast with the likes of Pattinson, Stewart and Lautner.
Also taking that weekend is M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender based on the original Nickelodeon series. Shyamalan is writing, directing, and producing the picture as always. You will not see me at the movies on this July 4th weekend.
Those films will rule over as the major blockbuster-wannabes right up until July 16, when two major studio pictures will go head-to-head for the #1 spot – Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer’s kid-friendly, Nicolas Cage starring, National Treasure-esque (I only say that because it has the same studio, producer, star and director) take on Fantasia: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
Rivaling it will be Christopher Nolan (the director who brought you classics like The Dark Knight and Memento)’s science-fiction/neo-noir thriller: Inception where your mind is the scene of the crime. With a reported budget of $200+ million and Leonardo Dicaprio in the lead, Warner Brothers is banking a lot on what appears to be a quite complex thriller that seems to resemble The Matrix and Blade Runner.
There are many other films coming out this summer – you don’t need me to tell you that. These films I have selected up here are what have seem destined to be the largest blockbusters, and from the look of it, I’d say our odds are 50-50 as to whether or not we’ll have a summer filled with great popcorn flicks like 2008 and 2007, or whether we’ll have another 2009 on our hands where no blockbuster was worth seeing twice except for maybe Up and Inglourious Basterds.
As for what I think will be the highest grossing film of the summer and subsequently the year, it is my belief that Iron Man 2 will conquer the box office in its entirety. It is very common for a second movie in a franchise to be the highest grossing one (as is the case with Pirates of the Caribbean, X-Men and The Dark Knight) and Iron Man built up strong national and international fan-bases. Robert Downey Jr. is not only back, but as a star he’s bigger than ever (Sherlock Holmes did $450 mil worldwide) and is quickly climbing his way to being the #1 superstar on the planet, so I predict that Iron Man 2 will be our highest grossing film of the summer and maybe the year. At least I know I’ll be pre-ordering my ticket to see it on Fandango the night it comes out.
As for what I think will fail and succeed, I feel that Robin Hood should find an audience, Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe haven’t let us down yet – except with Body of Lies. Toy Story 3 I’m sure will be another phenomenon and complete the trilogy nicely. It looks somewhat similar to other summers, though fortunately enough it is not flooded with comic book movies and an excessive amount of sequels. Most of these films are not capitalizing on the new 3-D gimmicks, and we also have many new ideas on the scene. With some new original films, perhaps the summer blockbuster season of 2010 could have a lot to say about the future of cinema.
