12. The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping
With or without Jennifer Lawrence’s heroic archer, Katniss Everdeen, audiences can’t get their fill of The Hunger Games, so 2023’s The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is being followed by another prequel adapted from one of Suzanne Collins’s novels. This one is set 24 years before the first set of Hunger Games films, so it features younger versions of several of the main characters from the Katniss saga. It should be fun to see how well the new actors match the old ones. Ralph Fiennes plays President Snow, who was played as an older man by Donald Sutherland; Jesse Plemons plays Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character, Kieran Culkin plays Stanley Tucci’s, Elle Fanning plays Elizabeth Banks’s, and Joseph Zada is the twentysomething hero, who is due to become the middle-aged alcoholic played by Woody Harrelson. The director is Francis Lawrence, who made all of the other Hunger Games films, as well as last year’s Stephen King adaptation, The Long Walk – another dystopian thriller about young people being killed as televised entertainment. (NB)
The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping is released on 20 November
13. Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew
In the early 2000s, back when every studio wanted its own children’s fantasy adventure franchise to compete with Harry Potter, there were three films adapted from CS Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia novels – and now, after a 16-year break, comes a fourth. Confusingly, it’s actually based on the sixth of Lewis’s Narnia novels, which is the first if you’re going by the chronology of the events in the story. In other words, The Magician’s Nephew is a prequel set 40 Earth years and 1,000 Narnia years before The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. Emma Mackey plays Jadis, the evil White Witch, alongside Carey Mulligan and Daniel Craig, but the most exciting person involved is the writer-director, Greta Gerwig. This is the first film she has directed since Barbie conquered the world in 2023, so she’ll have the freedom and the budget to do whatever she wants. Anyway, as Wicked taught us, there’s definitely an audience for prequels with famous fictional witches. (NB)
Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew is released on 26 November
Universal Studios14. Disclosure Day
With ET, Steven Spielberg created one of the cutest space aliens ever to visit Earth. But we’re not sure what kind of creatures are headed our way in his latest film. Josh O’Connor stars as a man who knows something about that, and is determined to tell the entire world at once. “People have a right to know the truth,” he says in the mysterious trailer. “It belongs to seven billion people.” He sometimes stands in a crop circle, a classic UFO clue. Emily Blunt is a television meteorologist in Kansas who suddenly freezes and utters strange sounds, Colin Firth’s eyes suddenly change colour, and Eve Hewson, Wyatt Russell and Colman Domingo are also on hand dealing with the threat. The secrecy around the film has inspired wild theories about what it might be, including the idea that it could be a sequel to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. What we know for sure is that no one does aliens better than Spielberg, whether they are as benign as ET or as ominous as those in War of the Worlds. (CJ)
Disclosure Day is released on 12 June
Universal Studios15. The Odyssey
It’s safe to assume that Homer’s ancient Greek poem is not the reason this film is so wildly anticipated that tickets went on sale a year in advance. The draw here is Christopher Nolan, adapting the classic with his epic imagination and a very starry cast, in the follow up to his Oscar-winning Oppenheimer. Matt Damon stars as the warrior-king Odysseus, on his dangerous, surreal journey home from the Trojan War. Anne Hathaway plays his patiently waiting wife, Penelope, with Tom Holland as their son, Telemachus. Robert Pattinson is Antinous, a suitor to Penelope and Zendaya plays the goddess Athena. Lupita Nyong’o, Charlize Theron, Jon Bernthal and a raft of others are also in the cast. One of Nolan’s gifts is to merge large-scale action with distinct, vivid characters, and this film promises to offer both kinetic battle scenes and personal drama. Nolan told Empire magazine about Odysseus, “The genius of the character, the cleverness, the inventiveness of him, was a huge part of what interested me.” And a sneak preview of a few scenes revealed there is definitely a Trojan horse. (CJ)
The Odyssey is released on 17 July
16. Avengers: Doomsday
Avengers: Endgame is one of the highest grossing films ever made, but since it came out in 2019, none of Marvel’s superhero films have had as much of an impact. The studio’s solution? To turn back the clock and do everything Avengers: Endgame did – only more so. First of all, the producers have squeezed in every possible Marvel superhero, including the Fantastic Four and the X-Men, who were previously in separate cinematic universes. Secondly, they’ve brought back many of their most popular characters, including Chris Evans’s Captain America, Chris Hemsworth’s Thor, Paul Rudd’s Ant-Man, and Tom Holland’s Spider-Man. They’ve also brought back the MCU’s most revered actor, Robert Downey Jr, only now he’s playing the villainous Doctor Doom instead of Iron Man. And they’ve even brought back the directors of Avengers: Endgame, Joe and Anthony Russo, whose post-Endgame films – Extraction, Cherry, The Gray Man, The Electric State – haven’t set the world alight, either. Will this new Endgame be a new beginning? (NB)
Avengers: Doomsday is released on 18 December
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