Avatar: The Way of Building a Franchise

Avatar: The Way of Water Review Building a Franchise

 

I didn’t feel compelled to write a full review of Avatar: The Way of Water after I initially saw it for a couple reasons. One, I knew it would be heavily talked about and don’t always like talking about a new movie simply because it’s new and popular in order to get more views. I only talk about big new movies upon their release when I have a substantial amount of opinions, observations, and reactions (the last two big examples of this would be Jurassic World Dominion and Prey), and two, I didn’t have all that much unique to say about it, because I was a little let down by it.

But then, I saw it again, and I started thinking about it in relation to the original Avatar and its place in the context of the budding Avatar franchise, and I realized I now had more to say. This isn’t going to be a conventional review of either movie, but I am going to reference Avatar: The Way of Water freely, so if you haven’t seen it and don’t want it to be spoiled, you’ll have to read past this point at a later time after you’ve seen it. But, if you aren’t worried about a few spoilers (here’s one: the sequel is basically the same story as the first one) then read on.

 

Part One: The Franchise Begins

Let’s start with Avatar (2009). I don’t believe there was actually ever any kind of mass revolt against this movie after it made over 2 billion dollars the way the internet often depicts. I remember how massively popular it was all throughout 2010. I saw it for a second time in the theater in 3D in January, and I got the DVD at some point in April/May. I was a huge fan at the time and must have watched it two or three times before I finally got the three-disc extended edition blu ray set released in November. I stayed up extra late on a school night just to watch the nearly-three-hour cut that reinstated deleted scenes with fully completed visual effects, and it wasn’t until 2011 that I started picking up on the Avatar hate, and that hate train certainly did build up some steam.

I never got on that hate train, but once it started chugging along it was hard to ignore, especially the whole “It’S jUsT dAnCeS WiTh WoLvEs In SpAcE” whining that became a simplistic solution for haters to use as a catch-all explanation for why it supposedly sucked. As you might be able to tell by my tone and silly spelling, I don’t agree with all the pure hatred, but I’m certainly not wearing blinders when it comes to my defense of Avatar. I recognize the lesser aspects of the film, and I don’t deny that it is very comparable to Dances with Wolves, Pocahontas, Fern Gully, and myriad other arguably better films/stories. Instead of picking it apart and making my long-gestating Avatar analysis into something negative, I want this to be a positive look at the movie(s) and an optimistic take on the whole thing, so I’m going to explain why I actually still really enjoy the original film all these years later, though not as much as when I was fifteen years old. 

Avatar has all the familiar themes and content that I’ve enjoyed since I was a kid and still enjoy seeing done in new ways: the creatures, plants, environments, and the technology are all thrilling. People in cryogenic sleep on a space ship on their way to another planet? Sure, it had been done before, even by writer/director James Cameron himself, but it’s treated as something you’ve never seen quite like this before, and the movie gets its hooks in the audience right away. We wake up with Jake Sully and are introduced to the world of Pandora along with him. He isn’t quite as amazed as Dr. Grant and Dr. Sattler are when they first see a living dinosaur in Jurassic Park, but it’s a similar approach to pulling the audience into the world along with the characters and making everything seem completely authentic, even though it’s all outlandish. This happens multiple times throughout the movie—Jake Sully gets in his avatar body for the first time, he encounters the creatures of the forest for the first time, he meets Neytiri for the first time—and it creates this sense of wonder throughout. Obviously the visual effects are astounding, but I really love the designs for nearly everything on Pandora. I had never seen an alien world so completely brought to life in such a consistent visual tapestry before. Everything looks like it belongs in the jungle, there is so much colour, bioluminescence, and variety that it never for a second gets dull, and the motion capture characters inhabit the world in an equally flawless fashion.

James Cameron knows how to direct action sequences, and Avatar has some of his finest work in this regard. It has the largest scale action set pieces he’s ever created, even larger than Titanic or The Abyss, and the action seems to know no bounds. In spite of the familiar narrative, weak characterization, and uninspired dialogue, Avatar is a pleasing, easy-to-enjoy sci-fi epic. Even though it told a complete story that had a perfectly satisfying ending, it did seem to beg to be expanded upon in a sequel. But what would a sequel to something this groundbreaking (visually) be like? I had far too many years to wonder, and James Cameron had far too much investment in outdoing the exhibition of technology he put on in the first one.

 

Part Two: The Sequel Anticipation Problem

Avatar: The Way of Water is my least favourite sequel James Cameron has ever made, but that’s a funny statement to make, and here’s why: it’s only his third. The first time he made a sequel was Aliens (1986) which wasn’t even a sequel to his own original movie. 20^th Century Fox hired him to write and direct the follow-up to Alien (1979) based on the success he had with The Terminator and his intriguing pitch for how to bring the xenomorph back and multiply the threat. It was a huge success, and he would later go on to make Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991), which allowed him to finally execute an idea he’d had back when he made the first movie but wasn’t able to do on such a low budget with inadequate moviemaking technology: a cyborg made of liquid metal. The T-1000 was just one of many additions, improvements, and expansions Cameron made to his Terminator sequel that made it superior to the original in many ways (but maybe not all ways). After T2, he went back to making original films—True Lies, Titanic, and Avatar—but after the success of Avatar, a sequel was announced, and James Cameron would be coming back to make it…only, he didn’t want to just make one sequel, he had an entire multi-film saga in mind.

This is what I mean when I say I had too much time to think about what the second Avatar would be: the anticipation for a new James Cameron sequel to a film that could have been improved upon was too great. The few teases we were given over the many intervening years—it’s going to be like The Godfather in terms of being about the Sully family and the family’s legacy and ongoing conflict, it’s going to feature new aquatic environments and a new Na’vi tribe, it’s going to have motion capture performances in the water—were simultaneously too much, hyping me up into believing it would be more story-driven and more character-driven than the first movie, and not enough, not giving me a clear insight into what, precisely, I should be excited about seeing in the sequel. Instead of the second movie being about another epic conflict like the first movie, it’s about a smaller scale conflict, and instead of being a story that moves along at a good pace and is structured rather soundly (despite being long and action-packed), it’s a bloated story that takes too long to get to where it is obviously going. Perhaps it’s not fair to compare it to Aliens and T2, but it is a far cry from how great those sequels were.

Avatar: The Way of Water feels like a highly unconstrained sequel, but at the same time it’s also not a very satisfying one in terms of appeasing those who found the first one lacking or those who were in love with the blue alien forest tribe. James Cameron clearly had these big ideas he wanted to achieve, like creating a new set of creatures that are the ocean equivalents to those he introduced in the jungle, or having a harrowing sequence of humans hunting the whale-like creature in a futuristic Moby Dick re-enactment, or bringing back the main human villain as an avatar with implanted memories so he could bring back the same actor again and do something that had never been done before, but he wasn’t that concerned with how to get to those concepts and sequences, narratively speaking. And so, this is another big reason why I was initially disappointed with it. But, there’s a key factor involved here that makes this sequel totally different from the other two sequels he made decades prior, and that’s his giant Avatar franchise plan.

Marvel really changed the game when they started putting out multiple superhero movies between 2008 and 2011 and then brought them all together in The Avengers in 2012. That had never been done before, and another thing that had never been done before was promising audiences an entire slate of films that would follow it up. Sure, such things had been planned behind-the-scenes before, but never had a film “phase” been advertised to the public the way Marvel’s Phase Two was, and they lived up to their promise. We got a slew of superhero flicks between when Avatar and Avatar: The Way of Water came out, including Avengers: Endgame which beat Avatar at the box office—a feat that had seemed nearly impossible. Why was James Cameron sleeping on his sequel for so long? Why wait over a decade to put out the next movie? Well, he didn’t wait.

James Cameron started developing the first Avatar right after Titanic came out. Think about that for a second. He was working on the movie in the late 90’s and it didn’t even come out until 2009! In fact, the TV series Avatar: The Last Airbender, which started airing in 2005, had to be called that because Cameron already had the rights to the title Avatar. One of the main reasons it took him so long to make it was the technology hadn’t yet reached the level of sophistication he needed it to be at to fully realize his vision. After Avatar’s huge box office success he started working on the sequel right away, but a number of factors caused the production to be long and the release to be delayed multiple times—not the least of which was the pandemic. Cameron wasn’t just planning one sequel, though. The news that eventually came out was a whole franchise was being planned, and he had recruited some pretty good screenwriters to help him—a move that I found surprising. Giving his filmography a quick look, of the eight movies he has directed (this is excluding Way of Water) he has sole screenplay credit on five of them.

The reason he put together the writing team was so he could focus more on directing and get the scripts completed faster. Unfortunately, this “team” didn’t demonstrate anything new or different in the screenplay for The Way of Water. Jake Sully and his family go to a new tribe and learn to live among them in a very similar manner to how Jake Sully originally learned to live among the forest tribe in the first movie, and they’re antagonized by the same antagonistic force. The dialogue is still generic and at times cringe-worthy, and the cast of characters is problematic in multiple ways. Jake Sully’s family is the focus, and his kids vary from annoying to boring, while his wife Neytiri gets criminally underused for most of the story, and Jake himself demonstrates how bad of a father he is from one scene to the next. Even though I found the story even less interesting than the original, I still have hope for the future of the Avatar franchise, and it’s not because I’m a James Cameron super fan, or because I’m an eternal optimist, or because I haven’t learned better.  

 

Part Three: The Potential of Part Three

I suspect The Way of Water has set a story in motion that will continue in the third film and beyond, and this is part of the reason I’m still hopeful. James Cameron has never made a sequel to a sequel before. To quote Sarah Connor from T2: “We were in uncharted territory now…making up history as we went along.” I realized after watching The Way of Water a second time that I’m actually more excited about the third movie than I was about the second one. As I had predicted, The Way of Water was a sequel that was also sort of a retelling of the same story again, just like Aliens and Terminator 2 were, but I had hoped it would find a greater focus on the characters like those sequels did, which it did not. That could still happen in the next one, though, and there will be far less time waiting to see it. The beginning of The Way of Water speeds through many years of the story (partially to account for how much time has passed in real life since the first movie), but I don’t think that will happen at the beginning of part three.

I see so much potential in the new characters who were introduced in The Way of Water—much more potential than the characters who carried over from the first movie. I thought Jake Sully was a fine protagonist in the first one, but he should not have been so prominent in the follow-up. Neytiri is a far more interesting character, and I sincerely hope next time she gets more of a story than just raging against the villain in the climax because her kid got killed. Kiri, the teenage daughter of Dr. Grace Augustine’s avatar (both characters played by Sigourney Weaver) has the most potential of all, I think. It was a little strange hearing such an old voice coming out of such a young character (with motion capture allowing her to perform as someone decades younger than she actually is), but Kiri seems like an old soul, and her connection to Eywa is definitely something that will be explored in future films and connect with some of the continuing themes.

Even the villain, who I didn’t care for in the first movie, has the potential to be more than he was/currently is. The idea of bringing back actor Stephen Lang in mo-cap to play an avatar made of the DNA of the colonel from the first movie who was killed, implanted with his memories and his hatred of Jake Sully, is an interesting idea, but it wasn’t executed as well as I’d hoped it would be. Still, this guy, who hated avatars and the Na’vi and basically everything about Pandora in the first movie, now has no choice but to adapt to his new reality in order to bring down Sully, and what will happen when he does? What will his purpose be once Sully is dead? The introduction of the colonel’s estranged human son adds another interesting layer to the potential with him as a villain, too. Whether or not any of these characters will reach their full potential is yet to be seen, but even though I didn’t find characters such as the avatar colonel or his human son or the new Na’vi water tribe particularly engaging in The Way of Water, I could imagine them becoming more endearing and compelling with further development.

I have no doubts about James Cameron’s imagination. I think he has had some brilliant ideas and probably has many more great ones in his brain, even more than he’ll be able to have realized in his life time, but I do question whether or not he has a really good idea for a cohesive narrative set on Pandora that needs to be told over the course of several films. Ideas are one thing, but stories are another, and whether or not his writing team can turn his great ideas into worthwhile stories has yet to be seen. Unlike the Marvel movies, there is no source material to work from. The world of Pandora is all out of Cameron’s imagination, for better and for worse. I think the world of Pandora has more than enough potential to sustain multiple concepts for sequels, that’s the easy part. What I am not so sure of is whether or not the Sully family has enough potential to sustain that many storylines (if they do remain the protagonists throughout all the sequels, as it currently seems they will).

The first Avatar took forever to make because of the technology and the level of special effects involved. The same issue is part of the reason The Way of Water took just as long—and why it came with an even heftier price tag than the first movie. But, the big difference between the two movies? Cameron was fully invested in making only one movie with the first one. The Way of Water is, currently, what audiences are focused on and talking about, but we need to remember something: it was shot at the same time as the third movie. Cameron is currently in post-production on Avatar 3, that’s where his focus is.

 

Part Four: A Franchise like No Other

The usual Hollywood model is this: if a movie does well, the sequel gets developed and released. If that one does well, the next sequel goes into production. It’s usually one at a time. Avatar: The Way of Water is a completely different situation than most sub-par sequels, and I wouldn’t call The Way of Water sub-par by any means, nor would I compare it to the Marvel movies in terms of them planning out multiple interconnected films. This is closer to (but not exactly the same as) what Peter Jackson did with the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The LOTR films were all in production at the same time, then post-production was completed on them one at a time and they were released one year apart (2001, 2002, 2003). Avatar 3 is set for release less than two years from now. James Cameron doesn’t have the excuse of technology holding back the release dates for these movies anymore, which begs the question: what is he going to do if he can’t rely on blowing everyone away with the special effects?

Avatar: The Way of Water really did push the envelope by having even more incredible motion capture (In the water, no less!), but the next movie isn’t going to have the same kind of new never-before-seen visual trick to wow us. Avatar 3 has to follow The Way of Water with a better story, and I have faith that it will. In James Cameron I trust. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if he has committed this much of his life to building Avatar into a multi-film franchise, there must be something there worth all this time and effort. He doesn’t need to be making them (although, as he’s said in interviews, he’d need to “train” someone how to direct an Avatar movie because it requires so much skill, so maybe he does need to make them all) and he doesn’t really need to appease fans who hold preconceived expectations, either.

Marvel movies will always be seen by that portion of the audience who are fans of the comic books, and be critiqued by them, too, but like I said earlier, there is no source material to compare the Avatar movies to. It’s not even like Star Wars where there’s a beloved original trilogy of films that anything else with the name Star Wars will always be compared to and held up against. Avatar as a franchise can still be anything, and that’s kind of exciting. I’m sure James Cameron knows his multi-film saga will have to start forming a more compelling long-form narrative if he’s going to get people to keep coming back to the movie theaters to see them. Visual effects, as we know, are only truly amazing when they’re in service of a story worth telling.

No, The Way of Water didn’t amaze me and thrill me and satisfy all my hopes and dreams of being one of the best sequels ever, but I think we might look back on it one day in the context of the franchise it will become part of and feel differently. Both this one and the original remind me why I love the science-fiction genre so much. There are so many possibilities, and even though I didn’t vibe with all the choices made in The Way of Water, they weren’t catastrophic choices that ruined my interest in the franchise. The colonel coming back as an avatar is rife with possibility—a character who could go down many interesting paths and have a far greater impact in the long term than he did in movie #2. Sigourney Weaver playing Kiri, the offspring of her character’s avatar from the first movie, was an interesting choice, and hearing an old woman’s voice coming from a teenage character took me out of the experience at times—yet even this creative choice could come around to have some kind of impact in the next movie or the one after it. What if she somehow has the spirit of Weaver’s human character within her because of her connection to Eywa? I don’t want to get too speculative here, but it’s hard not to when, as I said, there’s so much possibility.

There aren’t that many franchises currently running that I am all that invested in. Marvel has run its course for me and I now drag my feet going to most of the post-Endgame solo films instead of sprinting to all of them opening night. I still have Godzilla, King Kong, Alien, Predator, and some others, but Avatar is currently on-track to be the biggest franchise in terms of its production value and box office gross that I will be continuing to see when they get released in theaters. I’m over the 3D, I’m over the amazing visuals, but I am not over the fictional world these movies take place in. If the storyline dips even lower with the third one, though, in terms of creativity, intrigue, and compelling characters, I might change my tune a bit, but it’s almost like how I can’t fully decide how I feel about Dune: Part One until I see Dune: Part Two. Avatar: The Way of Water, despite being over three hours and a mostly self-contained narrative, still feels like part of a bigger story that’s (hopefully) going to get better with each new installment.

There has never been a franchise like Avatar before. There might never be another one quite like it ever again. For some people, more Avatar movies means nothing. The first one didn’t wow everyone, and the sequel has wowed even fewer viewers, I think. That’s fine; I think it has enough devoted fans to sustain being a franchise for at least five films, and I for one will at least enjoy taking another cinematic tour of Pandora every couple of years. Our world was a very different place when the first movie came out, but it won’t be quite so different in comparison to when the second movie was released and when the third one gets released. We are in a post-Covid world where theaters are still struggling to get people away from the ease of streaming movies and TV at home and give them reasons to come back to the cineplexes. If Avatar can continue to be one of the biggest reasons to keep going to the movies this decade, that’s okay with me.

What Movies Come Out in 2023?

What Movies Come Out in 2023?

 

When I looked ahead at the slate of films set to be released in the coming year, I was much more pleasantly surprised than when I went through the same process last year. 2022 didn’t have that many films coming out that I was particularly excited about, but it was also still a very uncertain year as to what movies we would actually end up getting. In the wake of two years of pandemic restrictions and constant delays and cancellations, the early 2022 release dates were all tentative ones, but in the end most movies came out as intended last year…and were disappointments.

2023 looks like it will be different. There are far more movies set for release this coming year that show promise, and even though a large portion of them are unnecessary sequels, many of them are original films from some great directors and writers, and as always, there will be movies that come out that weren’t on my radar that end up being great. In fact, many of my favourite movies of the past few years have been ones I had no idea were coming.

The internet likes to break down the years for cinema into four groupings of months (I guess loosely representing the four seasons of the year, or four quarters) so that’s how I’ll break it down for you, and we’ll comb through some of the releases I’m intrigued by, some of the ones that are sure to be the biggest blockbusters, and some that I can’t even believe are coming out.

 

 

January to March

 

Ah, yes, January horror movies: oh how they do suck—except when they don’t, like last year when we got a new Scream movie and it was actually a hit with critics and many fans. I still haven’t gotten around to seeing it, but I don’t think one surprisingly-not-terrible January horror release means we should get too excited for the ones coming in early 2023. M3GAN (January 6) is being produced by James Wan, and it looks like it could almost be as wacky as his previous directorial effort, Malignant, but M3GAN isn’t directed by him, so I’m not expecting much from what looks like a mix of Terminator and Child’s Play, with an evil AI doll as the villain. Another horror flick coming out early in the year is Knock at the Cabin (February 3) which is the newest film from M. Night Shyamalan. I know nothing about it, but after the mystifying experience that was his last film, Old, I’m at least intrigued.

February has an eclectic mix of films, but there is only one that I am confidently looking forward to. Magic Mike’s Last Dance (February 10) is the third Magic Mike film starring Channing Tatum and directed by Steven Soderbergh, and I can’t say I’m looking forward to it, since I haven’t seen either of the previous Magic Mike films, but the trailer seems to be selling a worthwhile threequel, and I expect it will be a hit just like the previous two. Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey (February 15) had a lot of buzz on the internet when it was announced because it is a horror take on the traditionally lovable honey-devouring bear. I mean, the concept alone is genius. The first trailer didn’t impress me that much, though—I’m unsure if the campy style and mix of humour and horror will work, and the effects look cheap, but maybe it will live up to its potential.

Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania (February 17) is the next installment in the never-ending MCU, and the trailer makes it look like the entire thing was shot on green screen sets. I know that’s true of pretty much all MCU films these days, but this one looks painfully obvious, and I can’t say I’m all that excited about a third Ant-Man adventure (his first post-Endgame solo outing) after the repeated disappointments of Marvel’s efforts last year. Finally in February there’s Cocaine Bear (February 24) which is the February release I’m most sold on. It’s based on a true story of a black bear that consumed a massive amount of cocaine someone lost in the woods and then went on a rampage. Beyond just the concept, I’m fascinated by the choice of director: Elizabeth Banks, primarily known for acting, who has directed Pitch Perfect 2 and the Charlies Angels reboot—films not exactly similar in content to a coked-out bear going berserk. It also has a stacked cast, so I don’t know if this is a project that we’re supposed to take seriously or not, but I am all in. I haven’t even watched the trailer, I just want to see it and be wowed.

March is more stacked than I remember it being in years. We have the previously-delayed Creed III (March 3) which is a huge movie for lead actor Michael B. Jordan to make his directorial debut with, but his connection to the fictional boxer is very much like Sylvester Stallone’s own, so seeing him step behind the camera is exciting, especially with the film having been shot with IMAX in mind. It is disappointing that Stallone isn’t involved at all this time, but hopefully the story of Adonis Creed is concluded in this third film so we can have a neat trilogy instead of ending up with another Rocky V situation.

Speaking of Scream last year, they fast-tracked another sequel, Scream VI (March 10) which I guess means they’re naming them like Star Wars movies now, but at least they gave it a number and didn’t just call it Scream for a third time. On the same day, an original film is being released, called Inside (March 10) which I am much more intrigued by. The trailer shows Willem Dafoe as an art thief who gets trapped in a high-tech apartment and has to survive with few provisions and a dwindling grasp on his sanity. I think it could get him his long-deserved Oscar for Best Actor and be an intense psychological thriller.  

Two notable action sequels in March are Shazam! Fury of the Gods (March 17) and John Wick: Chapter 4 (March 24). I thought the first Shazam was decent, especially for a DC movie, but I’m not all that interested in seeing another adventure with that superhero crew. The John Wick series has been surprisingly consistent, so I would at least be willing to check out the new installment, but based on my enjoyment of Chapter 2 and 3, I don’t think any of these sequels will ever quite match up to the original.

Finally that month we’re getting Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (March 31), which I’m not particularly excited about, since I’m not a huge fantasy nerd and I’ve never played D&D, but the trailer does make it look like it could be a fun adventure filled with quipping characters, weird monsters, exciting action, and decent CGI. It has to at least be better than the Dungeons & Dragons movie from 2000, right?

 

April to June

 

The Super Mario Bros. Movie (April 7) is the first time the video game character has been in a movie since 1994, and that previous live-action adaptation of the game (the first of its kind) was an abysmal failure, which is why Nintendo hasn’t allowed another Mario movie to be made until now. Jack Black as Bowser is a great voice casting choice, but Chris Pratt, who has been in too many movies at this point, has been made fun of every bit as much as he deserves to be for voicing the Italian plumber. The trailer actually showed off some charming animation and hints of fun adventure, but I doubt it will be the new best videogame film yet made. The other two big April releases on my radar I’m also doubtful of. Renfield (April 14) is based on the character from Dracula to some unknown capacity, but I don’t know anything else about it yet. Evil Dead Rise (April 21) I know more about: it’s a reboot/continuation of the Evil Dead franchise, without much involvement from writer/director Sam Raimi or star Bruce Campbell, so I’m leery on it. However, Campbell has spoken positively about it so far, and it’s said to be going back to the horror roots much like the 2013 remake did, though I wonder how it could go much harder than that version or the superb series Ash vs. Evil Dead which probably should have been where the franchise ended.

The month of May is typically when summer blockbuster season begins, but it seems there are more blockbusters spread throughout the year with every year that passes. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (May 5) is the MCU movie I’ve been looking forward to the most since Spider-Man: No Way Home. Writer/director James Gunn returns to conclude his trilogy, probably in thrilling, hilarious, and depressing fashion based on the first trailer and the rumors that this will be the final outing for this particular lineup of Guardians. Also in May we’re getting the tenth Fast & Furious movie, Fast X (May 19) which completely blew the opportunity to call it FasTen Your Seatbelts, but whatever. I don’t think I even saw the last two anyway. The controversial live-action remake of The Little Mermaid (May 26) will probably be a disappointment given the track record of live-action Disney remakes as of late, but maybe it will be a bit more original than The Lion King (2019) or Pinocchio (2021).

In June we finally get the delayed Spidey sequel Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (June 2), which no longer bears the title of Part One, so I suspect it will be a more complete film than it was originally pitched as, and hopefully the follow-up doesn’t get delayed. Another big sequel that month is Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (June 9), which looks closer in vision and tone to the previous Transformers film (Bumblebee) than the Michael Bay films, and it’s from the director of Creed II, so hopefully it’s a fun movie, but the transformer beasts or whatever they’re called look a little dumb and I think it might muddy the world-building and continuity even more than Bumblebee did.

The middle of June has three films slated for release that I’m interested in. 65 (June 16) looks like it’s basically a remake of Planet of Dinosaurs starring Adam Driver, so obviously sign me up for that. Asteroid City (June 16) is the newest film from Wes Anderson, and I’m excited just because it’s from him and it supposedly has one of the biggest ensemble casts he’s put together yet, so I don’t need to know more than that at this point. The Flash (June 16) has been one of the most delayed DC movies ever and overshadowed by controversy surrounding its lead, so who knows how it will be received, but I’m intrigued by the multiverse and time travel elements being teased. It might be an expensive couple of days for me at the Cineplex that weekend.

Finally, right at the end of June, we have another big, long-awaited sequel, which has been teased since Lucasfilm was acquired by Disney over a decade ago. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (June 30) brings back Harrison Ford as the aging (Aged? Ancient?) archaeologist/adventurer for one last outing, but I am not excited about it. The thing about the Indiana Jones trilogy (Raiders, Temple, and Crusade) was the series still felt serialized at that point, like the old adventure serials they were paying tribute to, and it should have stopped there, but then Kingdom of the Crystal Skull brought Indy back as an old guy who looked like he had been wearing the same outfit for thirty years and tried to sort-of replace him with Shia Labeouf, but it wasn’t what most fans were hoping for, and it seemed director Steven Spielberg had lost his youthful directorial spirit, ingenuity, and craft.  Spielberg isn’t directing Dial of Destiny, it’s from James Mangold, who aced it with Ford v Ferrari and Logan in past years, but this new “final adventure” seems poised to tell a worthless story and go down the same path as Disney’s Star Wars sequel trilogy as an exercise in collecting money rather than telling a worthwhile narrative.

 

July to September

 

In the summer month of July there are a number of big blockbusters set for release, and three of them are sequels. Insidious: Fear the Dark (July 7) is the fifth Insidious film, but original creators Leigh Whannell and James Wan have left the franchise behind, so guess who is directing this new one? Well, it sure surprised me to see that lead actor Patrick Wilson has stepped behind the camera, making his directorial debut. Honestly, I think that’s kind of cool that he’s passionate enough about the series to make that move. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (July 14) already has me sold thanks to the same director returning, as well as Tom Cruise and most of the cast from Fallout, and the little preview of a certain stunt shown in IMAX before Avatar: The Way of Water reminded me of just how crazy Cruise is when it comes to the action scenes in these movies.

Oppenheimer (July 21) is the story of the creator of the nuclear bomb, and the newest from director Christopher Nolan. It looks significantly better than his last movie that was supposed to “save” cinemas in the first summer of the pandemic, Tenet (which I didn’t like, by the way). Hopefully Oppenheimer is more in line with his other historical World War II-set drama, Dunkirk, and with one of the most impressive casts he’s ever assembled for one of his movies, including the reliably-excellent Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, I think it might be the best original film of the summer—but then again, it is competing with Barbie (July 21) which is the first live-action adaptation of the popular doll line, starring Margot Robbie as Barbie and Ryan Gosling as Ken. I’m actually excited to see both.

The Marvels (July 28) is the second solo film for Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel, and guess what? I don’t care. I’d rather see Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (August 4), which I’m pretty sure is the third or fourth film reboot of the heroes-in-the-half-shell. It’s another computer-animated feature, but with Seth Rogen behind it I think it might be a fun, different take on the characters. An August sequel that I am looking forward to is Meg 2: The Trench (August 4). I thought the first Meg was decent, but the second novel was better than the first novel which the first movie was more closely based on, so the second movie could follow suit. I haven’t heard anything about it, though, so I think there’s a chance it will be delayed, possibly into next year. The first movie was in development hell for two decades, so I’ve learned not to get my hopes up.  

Mario isn’t the only big video game adaptation coming in 2023. Gran Turismo (August 11) will hopefully be a better action flick than the similar racing-game-turned-movie starring Aaron Paul, Need for Speed, and I want to say it has a chance because good actors like David Harbour, Djimon Hounsou, and Orlando Bloom are in it, but Need for Speed had a good cast too, so it’s not a safe bet. It’s not even a safe bet pointing out the director, Neill Blomkamp, who hasn’t made a good feature film since Elysium, and even that one was nowhere near as good as his debut, District 9. The DC film Blue Beetle (August 18) I know similarly little about. I know even less about the Blue Beetle superhero character than I do about the Gran Turismo videogames, but I’m sure it will be at least a moderate hit.

September doesn’t usually have much to offer, and it’s the same deal this year, but I have to mention the strangest trilogy of sequels that are all coming out that month. There’s The Equalizer 3 (September 1), which I could care less about, but I am surprised it’s being made, especially since it’s been five years since the last one, then there’s The Nun 2 (September 8) which I will definitely be avoiding, because I heard enough about how bad the first one was and I am sick of mediocre Conjuring spinoffs and main series films, and then there’s The Expendables 4 (September 22)…seriously? The Expendables 3 downgraded the series to PG-13 and was a total waste of talent and time, but that was way back in 2014. Why bother now? I guess those aging action stars are hurting for another paycheck. And to top it all off, the title is being stylized as Expend4bles. Hollywood, please stop letting things like this happen.

 

October to December

 

In past years there have been some major releases saved for the last quarter of the year, but 2023 doesn’t have anything that big that I’m excited for, with one exception. Kraven the Hunter (October 6) is the newest installment in the highly questionable live-action Spider-Man cinematic universe, which turned into a certified meme last year with Morbius. Will Kraven be the new “It’s Morbin’ Time” or will lead actor Aaron Taylor-Johnson escape the roasting of fans that Jared Leto deservedly received? There hasn’t been much released about the movie yet, so only time will tell. Just to be clear, Kraven the Hunter is not the one exception for what I’m excited for in this quarter…

I’m also not excited for the currently untitled Exorcist reboot (October 13), which has a few illusions to make it seem like something that might be promising, even beyond that Friday the 13^th release date. Original Exorcist star Ellen Burstyn is back as Chris MacNeil, and it is being written and directed by David Gordon Green, who just concluded his reboot trilogy of the Halloween franchise. Poor ninety-year-old Ellen Burstyn is being dragged back out to reprise one of her greatest film roles by desperate studio execs after she had wisely declined to return to the franchise for almost fifty years, and David Gordon Green’s last two Halloween movies were terrible-yet-still-successful sequels. I don’t anticipate yet another Exorcist movie will be worthwhile, let alone achieve the impossible and be anywhere close to as good as the original or The Exorcist III, or be a worthy successor to the award-winning classic. Another horror franchise that should’ve remained dead but is somehow back yet again is Saw X (October 27)—yes, that’s the tenth Saw movie. I thought they had already past ten movies by this point.

Finally, in one of my least-favourite months of the year, there’s a cinematic bright spot: Dune: Part Two (November 3) is coming out! This will be the conclusion to the first half of Dune released in October 2021, and I sincerely hope it’s a satisfyingly-epic second part. It was touch and go for a short time there as to whether or not we would even get Part Two, but luckily the cast and crew returned and we can finally determine if Part One really was good or not with the full story being told. The rest of the movies in 2023 don’t interest me, but I’ll mention the big ones, anyway.

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (November 17) is based on the prequel novel by original Hunger Games writer Suzanne Collins, which I’m sure will be another huge YA hit, then there’s Wonka (December 15) which is only interesting because Timothée Chalamet will be playing a younger version of the character, but that’s where my interest in it ends. An untitled fourth Ghostbusters (December 20) is set for release at the end of the year, and despite some positive reviews for the previous Ghostbusters: Afterlife, I don’t think it’s my nostalgic-cash-grab kind of thing at this point, and I’m even less interested in yet another unnecessary sequel. Finally, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (December 25) brings back Jason Momoa as the King of Atlantis (and Amber Heard as Mera, apparently, despite all the controversy), once again directed by James Wan, who directed 2018’s Aquaman. I didn’t think Aquaman was all that bad, but it also wasn’t all that good, so I think I’ll pass on the sequel.

That wraps up my preview of 2023 movies! Hopefully it will help you to know what to look forward to in the coming year and which movies will be worth going out to the theater for. Stayed tuned throughout the year for reviews, recommendations, and lots more!