The success of The Devil Wears Prada 2 kicks off a busy season for some of its stars. Anne Hathaway already starred in Mother Mary during the spring, and she’ll follow the fashion hit by portraying Penelope in The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s epic poem that features more A-listers and Oscar nominees than any Marvel superhero movie we’ve seen. If that’s not enough, she also headlines the science-fiction film The End of Oak Street, which comes out in August and appears to be about a suburban neighborhood that’s transported to a place with dinosaurs. It’s by David Robert Mitchell, who is known for It Follows.
Meanwhile, her co-star Emily Blunt isn’t exactly sitting at home. She’s headlining Steven Spielberg’s new alien-invasion movie Disclosure Day, details about which are hard to come by just now. You’ll also be able to see DWP2 actors Simone Ashley in the amnesia thriller This Tempting Madness and Rachel Bloom in Stop! This! Train!, a parody of 1970s disaster movies that’s so gay that RuPaul portrays the president of the United States.
The blockbuster crowd will have plenty more to chew on, starting this week with Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu, which I will review soon. Pixar’s Toy Story 5 features the toys finding a new enemy in the form of a tablet computer for kids that threatens to take away their kid’s attention. Disney is also putting out the live-action version of Moana, while Warner Bros. counters with Supergirl, which promises the most interesting take on the superheroine that we’ve seen. In Minions & Monsters, the lovable yellow beings soldier on without their supervillains and look for alien allies.
On a smaller scale, the Scary Movie franchise reboots itself with parodies of a new generation of horror films and the Jackass series comes out with what its makers have promised to be its last installment. It’s all enough to make you forget that there’s no Marvel movies until Christmas, unless you count Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which stars Tom Holland, Zendaya, and Jon Bernthal, who are all in The Odyssey as well.
Courtesy A24 Films
Need a palate cleanser? Nate Bargatze headlines his first major film with The Breadwinner, and we’ll see if this comedy about a man running his household while his wife goes off to found a new startup is anything more than a Mr. Mom update. Tuner also has a first-time headliner in Leo Woodall (from last fall’s Nuremberg) as a piano tuner whose extremely sensitive hearing gets him employed as a safecracker by house robbers.
If you’re looking for a non-animated musical, John Carney (who previously made Once and Begin Again) comes out with Power Ballad, with Paul Rudd as a struggling songwriter who watches Nick Jonas’ famous pop star steal his song. We’re also getting a concert film of the Tony-winning Broadway musical Hadestown, whose use of ancient Greek mythology will make an interesting juxtaposition with The Odyssey.
Backrooms represents a first: a 4chan thread becoming a movie. Kane Parsons took the 2010s creepypasta about a liminal space with endless numbers of rooms populated by hostile forces and turned it into his own web series and now a movie starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve. The Australian horror film with the loaded title Leviticus is about a gay teenage club haunted by a demon who can impersonate either of them, while pop singer Hayley Kiyoko (whose songs are a mainline into lesbian drama) makes her filmmaking debut with the romance Girls Like Girls. Scheduled for an August release is Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Jane Schoenbrun’s follow-up to I Saw the TV Glow that riffs on 1980s slasher films and features more openly nonbinary actors than I’ve ever seen in one movie. One can only hope that Masters of the Universe leans that far into the homoeroticism and camp of the 1980s animated TV show that it’s based on.
I’ll leave you with Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, a comedy that comes out in July and stars Zoey Deutch as a woman who makes a pact with her boyfriend that they both receive a free pass if they ever have the chance to have sex with their favorite famous person. When the boyfriend actually manages to cash in his pass, she resolves to do it with her celebrity crush, Jon Hamm (who portrays himself) regardless of the consequences. I’m looking forward to this mostly because of the movie’s trailer, which entirely consists of Hamm’s Mad Men co-star John Slattery (who also portrays himself) trying to enter Hamm’s house and having Hamm’s assistant slam the door on his foot at least 20 times. Sometimes you have to suffer for art.
