Let’s skip past the introductory paragraph and dive right in. The horror movie series from the 1980s are in no small part responsible for the franchise-driven mentality of Hollywood today, so it’s appropriate that this summer brings us the likes of M3GAN 2.0, in which the killer robot is brought back to stop another killer robot with the same design. I Know What You Did Last Summer is a sequel to the similarly named 1997 slasher film that brings back Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr. (whose characters survived the first two movies) to counsel another group of teenagers being hunted over bad deeds. Witchboard is a remake of the 1986 film about teens conjuring evil with a Ouija board — does anything good ever happen in movies because of a Ouija board? Anyway, 28 Years Later reunites director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland for a third installment of the British zombie series that started in 2002, and The Conjuring: Last Rites is technically outside the summer movie season because it comes out in the first week of September, but it promises to wrap up the series.
Those will be joined by original horror films, trailing in the wake of the box-office history that Sinners has made as such. The Australian twin brothers Danny and Michael Philippou, who made a splash two summers ago with Talk to Me, follow up with a film called Bring Her Back, about which details are scarce at the moment. Zach Cregger is also directing his second film, chasing his 2022 film Barbarian with Weapons, whose creepy trailer has been the talk of the multiplexes. Real-life married couple Dave Franco and Alison Brie star in Together as a married couple whose country getaway runs into evil forces.
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Then, of course, there’s more mainstream remakes like Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, which is the eighth and possibly last film in the series and whose review runs online this week. Next week’s Karate Kid: Legends unites Jackie Chan’s Mr. Han with Ralph Macchio’s Daniel-san to make the series into a continuous cinematic universe. Ballerina is a spinoff of the John Wick series with Ana de Armas as a dancing assassin seeking revenge for her family. We’ve got live-action remakes of animated films in Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon, both of which place voice actors from their original films in front of the camera. Maybe the most intriguing remake is Highest 2 Lowest, Spike Lee’s American version of an Akira Kurosawa corporate thriller from the 1950s, starring Denzel Washington.
The Fantastic Four: First Steps is Hollywood’s third attempt at making that comic-book series work (fourth if you count the low-budget 1990s version that Marvel has ruthlessly kept out of the public eye), and perhaps the 1960s period setting will click everything into place. James Gunn’s version of Superman attempts to reboot DC Comics’ flagship superhero. Bob Odenkirk returns as his everyman who’s secretly a killer in Nobody 2, and Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan reprise their roles in Freakier Friday, in which they’re dealing with parenting issues. Scarlett Johansson joins Jurassic World: Rebirth, the latest in a series that made piles of cash without anyone actually liking it. A reboot of The Naked Gun has Liam Neeson taking over for the late Leslie Nielsen. We’ll see how well that works.
On a smaller scale, we get horror masters outside their comfort zone. The Life of Chuck is adapted from a gently mystical Stephen King novel about a man seeking the meaning of existence, while Ari Aster forays into satire with Eddington, about a Western town turning to quack cures during the COVID pandemic. Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is a comedy about a Frenchwoman who makes the pilgrimage to England to pay homage to her favorite novelist. Wes Anderson returns with another star-laden comedy in The Phoenician Scheme, starring Benicio del Toro as an aviation mogul attempting to pass on his business empire.
Director Celine Song won a lot of critical adulation for her 2023 romantic film Past Lives, and she follows that with Materialists, with Dakota Johnson as a high-level matchmaker who finds herself romantically torn between Pedro Pascal and Chris Evans. (Pascal is also in Eddington and The Fantastic Four, so you’ll get lots of him this season.) A couple of Scottish directors follow up their critical successes, as David Mackenzie (Hell or High Water) directs Relay, an American-set action-thriller with Riz Ahmed and Lily James, and John Maclean (Slow West) helms a Japanese samurai movie called Tornado.
Not fitting into any of the previous categories is F1: The Movie, with Brad Pitt as a washed-up auto racer who joins a prominent Formula One team, with Top Gun: Maverick’s Joseph Kosinski directing. The same goes for Pixar’s latest film Elio, about a boy who believes he’s destined to be abducted by aliens. Whether nostalgia or novelty is your thing, the multiplexes always have something for your tastes.
