A show of cinematic strength

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/01/2015 (4305 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In terms of cash, total North American box office was down in 2014 compared to the previous year, with an accumulated US$10.5 billion in ticket sales, down from 2013’s $10.9-billion haul, according to estimates from the media measurement company Rentrak.

But if you’re betting on the figures, you shouldn’t put money on another decline in 2015.

Two words: Star Wars. Two more words: The Avengers. Two more words: James Bond.

But even if the year is lining up as a money-spinner for the studios, you should still consider it a worthwhile trip to the cinema for these reasons:

 

1. Dictatorships would rather you didn’t

Whether or not you believe North Korea was behind the Sony hack, it should be clear that Kim Jong Un’s dictatorship stood to gain from embarrassing the studio and playing hell with its release of the Seth Rogen/Evan Goldberg comedy The Interview. It depicts a ludicrous CIA plot to kill the North Korean leader by a couple of doofus TV newsmen, played by Rogen and James Franco, but the film’s satiric tone apparently went unappreciated in Pyongyang. The movie is available online, where it has already grossed US$15 million, proving you can keep a movie from theatres, but you can’t stop the paying public from seeing it. Still, nothing makes you appreciate the right to go see a movie quite like having that right revoked.

 

2. Downtown needs you

The June closure of the Globe cinemas in Portage Place meant one less important venue in town to see movies. Partially filling that void is the new Bandwidth Theatre on the corner of Ellice Avenue and Sherbrook Street, the site of the late, lamented Cinema 3. Already the new home base for the Winnipeg Aboriginal Film Festival, the theatre holds the promise of becoming an interesting hybrid art house/second-run theatre with an exciting future. Still holding the downtown line in the Exchange District is Cinematheque, a reliable source for the offbeat, the unusual and the artistic, thanks to the ongoing genius of programming co-ordinator Dave Barber.

 

3. The Year of the Geek

Like zombies exiting from their graves, the nerds will arise en masse from their folks’ basements for Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (Dec. 18), which proceeds with the characters of the original trilogy (stars Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill rejoin the fold) in addition to newcomers including Adam Driver, Oscar Isaac and John Boyega.

Fortunately, those geeks will have already gotten some sun, courtesy of the May 1 release of The Avengers: Age of Ultron, wherein the heroes of the biggest superhero movie of all time (box office-wise) battle James Spader’s mega-cybernautic weapon.

Given that the name of the next James Bond movie hearkens back to the Sean Connery years, can we assume Daniel Craig’s 007 will go old-school in Spectre (Nov. 6)?

Presumably bruised from the poor performance of the perfectly good science-fiction adventure Edge of Tomorrow, Tom Cruise supplies the big action in the safety of a franchise in Mission: Impossible 5 (Dec. 25), opposite the series’ usual suspects Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg and Jeremy Renner.

 

4. It’s comedy’s Year of the Woman

Movies seem to be catching up to reality when it comes to comedy with a feminine slant. We’re not just talking Pitch Perfect 2 (May 15) either, although that feminine-skewed a cappella comedy now boasts a female director in Elizabeth Banks. Another woman in the director’s chair is Anne Fletcher (The Proposal) offering up a distaff variation of Midnight Run in Don’t Mess With Texas (May 8), which casts Reese Witherspoon as a cop trying to protect a Mob boss’s widow (Sofia Vergara).

Saturday Night Live vets/Golden Globe hosts/pals Tina Fey and Amy Poehler reunite for a raucous comedy in Sisters (Dec. 18), playing siblings who have to pack up the stuff in their parents’ house and decide to throw a big party with all the popular kids from their high school years.

 

5. Putting the reboots to us

Of all the rebooted movie properties hitting theatres this year, we’ll have to wait the least amount of time for the most interesting. That would be Mad Max: Fury Road (May 15), starring Tom Hardy as the titular angry guy who finds himself a pawn in a battle between two factions of post-apocalyptic primitives, including Charlize Theron. It’s directed by the original’s George Miller, who has apparently lost none of his manic energy, judging by the trailer.

Pan (July 24) tells the story of how Peter Pan came to Neverland, with a fiendish pirate named… Blackbeard (Hugh Jackman) playing a pivotal role.

One has to wonder about what Guy Ritchie (Snatch) will do with the long-delayed property The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (Aug. 14), since it was once rumoured to be of interest to Quentin Tarantino. He may be the director to counteract the casting of bland-o actors Henry Cavill as Napoleon Solo and Armie Hammer as Ilya Kuryakin.

It hasn’t been all that long since the last Fantastic Four movie, but in an effort to get it right this time, The Fantastic Four relaunches with an Aug. 7 release date and a cast that skews younger, including Jamie Bell as Ben Grimm, Kate Mara as Sue Storm, Miles Teller as Reed Richards and Michael B. Jordan as Johnny Storm.

The troubled Terminator franchise is visibly going back to square one with Terminator: Genisys (July 1), which has an alternate take on the original film’s Sarah Connor/Kyle Reese timeline. Emilia Clarke and Jai Courtney play the apocalyptic lovebirds and a flesh-and-blood Arnold Schwarzenegger returns as an “aging” but benign terminator.

Jurassic World (June 12) brings us back to the realm of the dinosaurs, without director Steven Spielberg, but with freshly minted box-office stud Chris Pratt (Guardians of the Galaxy).

 

6. Compelling sequels

Hopefully, we are not intended to take literally the “second best” of the title The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (March 6). The original demonstrated middle-aged and senior moviegoers can deliver considerable box-office clout. Richard Gere joins the British cast of the first film as an American in India.

The further adventures of a teddy bear and his adult partner (Mark Wahlberg), Ted 2 (June 26) gives writer-director Seth MacFarlane a chance to redeem himself after the abysmal comedy that was A Million Ways to Die in the West.

There’s still room for vroom with Furious 7 (April 3), the latest in the increasingly bloated Fast and Furious series, a franchise that had seemed compromised by the tragic death of Paul Walker in mid-production. On the teen-dystopia front, The Divergent Series: Insurgent givens us its second instalment on March 20, while The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 (Nov. 20) finally brings the Suzanne Collins-penned trilogy to a ponderous close.

 

7. Comic-book and comic-book-esque new kids

Directing duo the Wachowskis’ delayed Jupiter Ascending (Feb. 6) sports a canine Channing Tatum coming to the rescue of galactic princess Mila Kunis. Marvel’s Ant-Man (July 17) stars Paul Rudd as a thief with the ability to shrink in size, but not in strength, a superhero movie that we hope follows in the one-off tone of Guardians of the Galaxy. From Mark Millar, the writer of Kickass, comes Kingsman: The Secret Service (Feb. 13), in which a teen delinquent (Taron Egerton) is drafted into a spy network by a dapper Colin Firth.

 

8. Original originals

Director Brad Bird (The Incredibles) is the brain behind Tomorrowland (May 22), starring George Clooney as a cynical former child genius who teams with a young woman (Britt Robertson) to seek the mythical realm of the title.

The Walk (Oct. 2) is a dramatization from Robert Zemeckis of the events depicted in the doc Man on Wire, wherein tightrope walker Philippe Petit (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) schemes to walk a tightrope between the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

Victor Frankenstein (Oct. 2), a sci-fi-flavoured treatment of Mary Shelley’s novel, casts James McAvoy as the mad scientist as seen through the eyes of his assistant Igor (Daniel Radcliffe).

Sounding a bit like the 1964 classic Robinson Crusoe on Mars comes Ridley Scott’s The Martian (Nov. 25), starring Matt Damon as an astronaut faced with the daunting task of surviving on Mars after being accidentally stranded on the Red Planet. (So does this movie tie into Interstellar? Just asking.)

 

9. ‘Toon time

It should be a rich year for animation with the cartoon kingpins of Pixar giving us two movies in one year: Inside Out (June 19) shows us the inner workings of a young girl’s brain, with anthropomorphized emotions including Joy (voiced by Amy Poehler) and Anger (voiced, naturally, by Lewis Black); on Nov. 25, The Good Dinosaur answers the question: What if dinosaurs hadn’t become extinct?

More on the juvenile fun side, we have the animated/live-action hybrid SpongeBob: Sponge Out of Water (Feb. 6) and the Despicable Me offshoot Minions (July 10).

Charles Schultz’s comic strip Peanuts (Nov. 6) is given an interesting three-dimensional facelift. It remains to be seen if it will amount to good grief or just plain grief.

 

10. Home movies

When it comes to films shot here in Manitoba, it’s often anybody’s guess as to when we might see the finished products. Mongrel Media has said Claudia Llosa’s ultra-bleak art film Aloft, starring Jennifer Connelly and Cillian Murphy, may be in theatres as soon as February.

Sean Garrity’s Borealis, starring Jonas Chernick, is a much-anticipated comedy-drama from the guys who gave us My Awkward Sexual Adventure. Like Paul Gross’s Afghanistan war drama Hyena Road, both might be completed in time for the Toronto International Film Festival in September.

According to producers, the kid-centric horror movie Wait Till Helen Comes, starring Maria Bello and Sophie Nélisse, should be out by Halloween. In the more comedic vein of horror, we anticipate a 2015 release for Astron-6’s gory/stylish giallo genre homage The Editor, a movie that out-Argentos notorious Italian director Dario Argento, as well as the cult killer/teen comedy Teen Lust, about a teen (Jesse Carere) who tries to lose his virginity before his Satanist parents have him sacrificed.

 

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca