The series could have been called Captain America: Aftermath and shored up into a theatrical movie. Instead The Falcon and the Winter Soldier became another one of those six-episode Disney+ streaming series that didn’t really have much to say about its characters–another story that pulls together the odd supporting characters from other films and wedges them into a new story intended to connect Phase III of the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Marvel’s future. Better production values than their network TV counterparts but not as riveting as the layered storytelling and worldbuilding in Marvel’s Netflix series, the Disney+ series pull together the movie actors in “bridge” stories to try to keep viewers coming back for more. Why didn’t Kevin Feige give the Falcon his own movie to show how he became Captain America? Who knows. But fans of the Marvel characters will get a chance to look back at how the filmmakers conceived their story for the series and its dozens of fight scenes in the forthcoming hardcover book,The Falcon and the Winter Soldier: The Official Marvel Studios Collector Special. It’s available for pre-order now here at Amazon, or order it from Elite Comics or your local comic shop.
The book is a great souvenir guide for the series that will introduce fans to the crew that made it happen. Check out a preview below.
Chris Pratt movies are a thing now just like Tom Cruise movies and Mark Wahlberg movies. The latest Chris Pratt movie is The Tomorrow War, which just arrived this past weekend on Amazon Prime. It’s every bit a vehicle for Pratt and could star nobody else. Like the Jurassic World movies, Passengers, and even The Magnificent Seven remake, Pratt is a unique casting decision but evidently studio execs keep going for his “aw, shucks” brand of characters. In The Tomorrow War, Pratt plays a biology teacher dad turned rescuer of mankind named Dan Forester. Forester is nearly impossible to distinguish from Pratt’s dinosaur confronting character in Jurassic World. Pratt plays that bit of a dope you can’t imagine actually doing any of the things his character encounters, so you may need to be a Pratt fan or simply be grateful it’s a free action movie and not mind you’re getting what you paid for. Either way, there are worse direct-to-TV movies out there, but as the alien invasion genre goes, don’t expect to count The Tomorrow War high on your list.
It’s that time of year again, time to take a look forward at what movies should be on your radar for 2021! But wait! Next year’s list sure looks a lot like the the films we previewed last December. The covid pandemic has delayed hundreds of film projects, but some made it through. When you walk back through last year’s list and compare it to movies released after theater lockdowns, you get some insight into how Hollywood thinks. Big movies and movies predicted to be successes were universally held back, while less popular films were released to low box office returns from theaters that remained open, and yet other films went directly to home streaming or related media platforms.
Last year we pulled 85 of the hundreds of films then slated for the 2020 movie calendar. The first two dozen made it to theaters (films like Underwater, Dolittle, and Birds of Prey) before the national shift began on March 11 with news of the NBA reacting to the pandemic by suspending pro basketball–the first national awareness of the scope of the problem. Suddenly we saw Vudu and other home platforms coming to the rescue for our entertainment fix, adding a new Theater at Home option, which captured movies like Anya Taylor-Joy’s Emma, Vin Diesel’s Bloodshot, and the animated Scoob! Disney began an interesting tiered release of Mulan, which for half the year showed a studio doing its best to maximize returns on what would have been a key release in any other year. After another delay The New Mutants made it briefly to theaters followed by home release after three years of getting kicked aside as the last vestiges of the Disney-Fox merger were shaken out. Other films, like Vast of Night, Extraction, The Old Guard, Rebecca,Radioactive, and Fantasy Island safely premiered on Netflix and Amazon Prime, with Chris Hemsworth’s Extraction standing out as the clear popular winner–the entire world needed some new entertainment and after what would only be the first of several months of shelter-at-home, it tentatively filled the void.
So our predictions for the year’s big genre films were flat wrong, every single one except Mulan was delayed to 2021, including Ghostbusters: Afterlife, Black Widow, No Time to Die, a new Fast & Furious, Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse, and superhero flicks Venom 2, Eternals, and Morbius. Wonder Woman 1984 is expected to have a theatrical release by year end. Altogether 35 of last year’s 85 movies previewed on our annual list are back again below, plus we found more than 35 new genre films we think will appeal to borg readers.
So what’s left and what’s new?
Grab your calendar and start making your plans–here are the movies you’ll want to see in 2021. Then compare the below list to our 2020 list, and look back to the 2019 list, 2018 list, 2017 list, 2016 list, 2015 list, or 2014 list. Last year we noticed studios moving genre content from the big screen to the small screen via streaming services, and the pandemic only stepped up that migration. Note: Warner Bros. has reported it will issue its 2021 releases simultaneously on HBO Max. Netflix has mostly dramas slated for 2021, but a few genre films are in pre-production, so expect a few surprises throughout the year. Amazon Studios has fewer, most partnerships with Blumhouse Productions.
As we learned well this year, many of these films will have revised release dates, and even get pushed to 2022.
January
Mortal Kombat. Based on the video game. New! Tentative release date: January 15, 2021. HBO Max.
Wrath of Man. Next Jason Statham action flick. New! Tentative release date: January 15, 2021.
The French Dispatch. Wes Anderson and his familiar actors in new quirky film about journalists. New! January 28, 2021.
The Dig. A film about a woman finding archaeological treasures on her land, starring Ralph Fiennes, Lily James, and Carey Mulligan. January 29, 2021. Netflix.
It’s that time of year again, time to take a look forward at what movies should be on your radar for 2020. Are you going to see them all? Heck no. These are the genre films we think borg readers will want to know about to make their own checklists for the coming year–and they are only the films we know about so far. We pulled 85 of the hundreds of films that have been finalized or are in varying stages of final production, slated for next year’s movie calendar.
What looks to top the list for most fanboys and fangirls? Ghostbusters: Afterlife! Scarlett Johannson solo in Black Widow! A new James Bond movie, No Time to Die. Vin Diesel in Bloodshot and a new Fast & Furious. The original Tom Clancy novel series is finally continuing with an adaptation of Without Remorse. Comic book adaptations are in less supply in 2020, but look for Venom 2, Wonder Woman 1984, Eternals, The New Mutants, Morbius, Birds of Prey, The Old Guard, and did we mention Black Widow? Compare the below list to our 2019 list and even the 2018 list, 2017 list, 2016 list, 2015 list, or 2014 list, and your takeaway may be seeing the studios moving genre content from the big screen to the small screen via streaming services.
Do you like sequels? There are far less coming to theaters in 2020 than in 2019, but many more remakes of movies, books, and TV shows are on the way. In fact, with all the blockbusters in 2019, 2020 looks pretty tame as the cinema marquee is concerned. Some films don’t have locked in release dates yet: Amazon Studios and Netflix haven’t revealed dates for the following 2020 releases (those we know you’ll find on the calendar below):
7500, a film about a highjacked airplane, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Amazon Studios)
The Dig,a film about a woman finding archaeological treasures on her land, starring Ralph Fiennes, Lily James, and Carey Mulligan (Netflix)
Horse Girl, Alison Brie stars and directs this story about an awkward girl who fuses her dreams with reality (Netflix)
Jingle Jangle, an animated Christmas story with the voices of Forest Whitaker, Keegan-Michael Key, and Hugh Bonneville (Netflix)
Louis Wain, biopic of the 19th century artist starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Claire Foy, and Andrea Riseborough (Amazon Studios)
The Old Guard, adaptation of comic book story, starring Charlize Theron and Chiwetel Ejiofor (Netflix)
Radioactive, a film about Marie Curie, starring Rosamund Pike and Anya Taylor-Joy (Amazon)
Rebecca, adaptation and remake of the Daphne Du Maurier classic novel, starring Lily James, Keely Hawes, Kristin Scott Thomas, and Armie Hammer (Netflix)
Welcome to Sudden Death, sequel to Jean-Claude van Damme 1995 movie starring Michael Jai White (Netflix)
The Willoughbys, animated adaptation of the Lois Lowry book, with voices of Maya Rudolph, Martin Short, and Jane Krakowski (Netflix)
Wonderland, murder conspiracy mystery starring Mark Wahlberg, Allan Arkin, and Colleen Camp (Netflix)
Some of these films will have revised release dates, or get pushed to 2021.
So grab your calendar and start making your plans–here are the movies you’ll want to see in 2020 (and some you might not!):
January
The Informer – Thriller, starring Joel Kinnaman, Rosamund Pike, Ana de Armas, Common, and Clive Owen – January 10.
Underwater– Thriller, stars Kristin Stewart in underwater horror story – January 10.
Dolittle– Family/Comedy, stars Robert Downey, Jr. in remake of the classic, with voices of Tom Holland, Rami Malek, Octavia Spencer, Emma Thompson, Antonio Banderas, Ralph Fiennes, and Michael Sheen – January 17.
Like most things about baseball, The Battered Bastards of Baseballreflects as much about an era of American culture, economics, and politics as it tells a wonderfully engrossing story about a brief history of the sport. Independent baseball–privately-owned teams unaffiliated with the Major League Baseball conglomerate–was a thing of the past when Portland, Oregon’s minor league baseball team the Portland Beavers left town. It was the early 1970s and Portlanders weren’t spending their time or money on minor league games. Then enters the well-known TV actor Bing Russell, stepping off his last of 14 seasons on Bonanza where he played a deputy sheriff. Russell appeared in everything back then, from Westerns from Wagon Train to Rawhide, and modern fare like The Munsters, The Rockford Files, and The Twilight Zone. There begins an underdog story, a mix of The Bad News Bears, Necessary Roughness, and Moneyball.
If you’re lucky enough to trip into the Netflix documentary The Battered Bastards of Baseball, you’ll wonder where this story is headed. It’s a brief history of 1970s Portland and national baseball, and then actor/movie star Kurt Russell and his mother Louise Russell begin discussing his father in a typical documentary format. It turns out father Bing had a life-long affinity for the game, even being part of a significant piece of baseball history as mascot for the New York Yankees, befriending Joe DiMaggio, Lefty Gomez, and Lou Gehrig, who gave Bing the bat he used in his last game before retiring. That love for the game apparently never left Bing, who concocted an idea to bring baseball right back to Portland by taking the entrepreneurial route–forming a pure upstart baseball team to play minor league ball. Resurrecting the independent team model he would hold an open tryout for the new Portland Mavericks–if you build it they will come. And they did. Players rejected from the big leagues, some retired, many with paunches, and pre-movie star Kurt on the team, too, some players older than most teams would favor, and a bunch of hairy-faced guys decades before it became the “in” thing–all would come together to form a motley band of brothers that would earn a crack at the pennant. With a 30-man roster, and Bing’s personal brand of fun, fans packed the stadium again, the team setting a record for the highest attendance in minor league history, blazing the trail in other ways, naming the first woman general manager in baseball, Lanny Moss. But like all good things it seems, a villain would enter the picture to wreck it all.
The real deal: Kurt Russell playing in the Minor Leagues with the Portland Mavericks.
With that nostalgic, cheery vibe of Ivan Reitman’s 1970s movie Meatballs or a dialed-back Slap Shot, Bing’s grandsons Chapman Way and Maclain Way splice together both baseball, Hollywood, and Portland nostalgia to assemble a completely engaging, crowd-pleasing story of underdogs and misfits and the pied piper who led them. If you remember that every baseball stadium in 1970s America–and every grade school–had kids chomping on Big League Chew–you’ll learn that connection to the Mavericks, too.
With costumes designed by Anna B. Sheppard, the designer for Schindler’s List, Band of Brothers, Inglourious Basterds, and Captain America: The First Avenger, you know your World War II movie is in good hands.
The first ninety minutes of Overlord is the stuff of the classic World War II movie. Think Guns of Navarone or Von Ryan’s Express or a later film, Force 10 From Navarone. It’s also modern in the way of Inglourious Basterds, but that movie if it had been filmed by John Carpenter, complete with special effects from The Thing and action from They Live. It also co-stars Kurt Russell’s son Wyatt Russell (also Goldie Hawn’s son) as the tough and confident Corporal Ford, a John Wayne role like he plays like he’s been making movies for 40 years. If that isn’t enough to go out and get your hands on Overlord, I don’t know what you could want.
It begins with a paratrooper drop, filmed believably, like Memphis Belle, but with the action of Edge of Tomorrow. The first 40 minutes follows British actor Jovan Adepo as American soldier Private Boyce, a nice, naïve kid drafted recently and dropped into harm’s way behind enemy lines in France the day before D-Day. Like Starship Troopers and Edge of Tomorrow, this is 100% authentic war, look and feel, and we follow Ford and boyce and their squad from the air on down to the gates of a town where they hide out and plan to blow up a German radio tower. Despite J.J. Abrams producing this film and hints to the contrary, don’t expect aliens or zombies–this is not a secret Cloverfield 4. What Boyce, Ford, & Co. find is a lab beneath the tower where the Germans are conducting experiments on the local French villagers and their own men. It’s here where the story takes a turn for the weird.
The first 90 minutes are brilliant, face-paced, heart-pounding, nail-biting stuff. Young director Julius Avery and writer Billy Ray pursue the lore of the German experiments toward a the creation of a “superman” or “super soldier” and what that might be like. To their credit, they approach this like the Korean series Kingdom, which looked to a virus as the creation of a village of zombie-like villagers. Here Avery and Ray look to twisted science as well, but they add in a bit of a fountain of youth element as part of the creation of these soldiers. Spoiler: They don’t all turn out exactly as planned by the Germans.
It’s that time of year again, time to take a look forward at what movies should be on your radar for 2019. Are you going to see them all? Heck no. These are the genre films we think borg readers will want to know about to make their own checklists for the coming year–and they are only the films we know about so far. We pulled 78 of the hundreds of films that have been finalized or are in varying stages of final production, slated for next year’s movie calendar.
What looks to top the list for most fanboys and fangirls? The last of the nine films in theStar Wars saga. Captain Marvel, Avengers: Endgame, and Spider-Man: Far From Home.Shazam!is DC’s contribution. Quentin Tarantino returns to movies to direct Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and Martin Scorsese is back with an all-star cast in The Irishman (on Netflix). M. Night Shyamalan finishes his dark superhero trilogy with Glass. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton return in Terminator. Jordan Peele is back with another horror film with Us.
Do you like sequels? This is your year. Another Men in Black, X-Men, Shaft, Happy Death Day, Lego Movie, Hellboy, John Wick, Kingsman, Jumanji, The Secret Life of Pets, How to Train Your Dragon, Fast and the Furious, Zombieland, Addams Family, Charlie’s Angels, Godzilla, Shaun the Sheep, Annabelle,and Stephen King’s It and Pet Sematary—Disney is trying to get you to move into your local theater with another Toy Story, Aladdin, Dumbo, Frozen, and Lion King–all in one year. Yep, lots and lots of sequels are coming.
Some films don’t have locked-in release dates yet. Amazon Prime and Netflix haven’t revealed dates for these 2019 releases:
Martin Scorcese’s The Irishman, a film about Jimmy Hoffa starring Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, Harvey Keitel, Ray Romano, and Bobby Cannavale (Netflix)
The Kid, a Western biopic with Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke, Dane DeHaan, and Vincent D’Onofrio (Netflix)
The Man Who Killed Hitler Then Bigfoot, starring Sam Elliott (Netflix)
6 Underground, a Michael Bay film starring Ryan Reynolds, Ben Hardy, Dave Franco, and Mélanie Laurent (Netflix)
The Last Thing He Wanted, Dee Rees directs Anne Hathaway, Ben Affleck, Willem Dafoe, and Toby Jones; journalist quits newspaper job to become an arms dealer for a covert government agency (Netflix)
The Laundromat, Steven Soderbergh directs Meryl Streep, Gary Oldman, Antonio Banderas, James Cromwell, about the Pentagon Papers (Netflix)
Radioactive, Rosamund Pike plays Marie Curie, with Anya Taylor-Joy (Amazon)
Some of these films will have revised release dates, or get pushed to 2020.
So grab your calendar and start making your plans–here are the movies you’ll want to see in 2019 (and many you might not):
January
Glass – Superhero, M. Night Shyamalan trilogy part 3, stars Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, James McAvoy; continues where Unbreakable and Split left off – January 18.
Serenity– Mystery/Thriller, stars Anne Hathaway, Jason Clarke, Djimon Hounsou, Jeremy Strong, Diane Lane; sorry, no relation to Firefly – January 25.
King of Thieves– Heist Comedy, stars Jim Broadbent, Tom Courtenay, Charlie Cox, Michael Gambon, and Ray Winstone – January 25.
November of course means Novembeard–where participants grow beards to raise awareness of men’s health issues. Or, just because beards are cool and it’s become an annual tradition. So who better to celebrate than the actor who has made a beard work for him throughout his career? That would be Kurt Russell. As Snake Plisskin in Escape from New York. As MacReady in The Thing. As Jack Burton in Big Trouble in Little China (stubble counts). (Russell only had a moustache in Tombstone so we’ll skip that one). As the sheriff in Bone Tomahawk. As John Ruth in The Hateful Eight. As Ego in Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2. Even his son Wyatt knows how to sport a cool beard–He wore won this year as the star of Lodge 49. So what’s left for the guy with the cool beard to take on next? How about playing the guy with the best beard of all time? That’s Santa Claus, of course.
The best part? In this trailer for Netflix’s new The Christmas Chronicles, Russell isn’t playing just another “Bad Santa” role. Sure, it looks like a traditional family Christmas show, but Russell revealing how cool Santa is (and always has been) and lines that sound like they were written for Jack Burton? That’s an inspired choice.
He knows when you’ve been bad or good, so you’d better clean up your act right now.
The movie stars Benji star Darby Camp and The Babysitter’sJudah Lewis as kids who want to film Santa in action. Look for co-stars Kimberly Williams-Paisley(Father of the Bride, Darrow & Darrow) as their mom, plus Lamorne Morris (New Girl, The Guild) and Martin Roach (Kick-Ass 2, The Shape of Water).
Check out this new trailer for The Christmas Chronicles:
The humor of AMC’s new series Lodge 49 pulls from those oddball, off-the-wall comedies of the past. The unlikely situational family antics of the Eddie Izzard seriesThe Riches. The dance between fantasy and reality that was Jeremy Piven’s series Cupid. The pathetic and at the same time hilarious lead played by Caroline Dhavernas in Wonderfalls. And that modern chaos and confusion you can find in the Zach Galifianakis show Baskets. Plus it has a lodge, which is pretty cool, but not in that cool woodsy lodge vibe of shows like Twin Peaks or Wayward Pines. No, this is a lodge as in Elks Lodge, or more like the Water Buffalo Lodge from The Flintstones. Part Cheers’ bar and part, well so far it’s mainly only like the Cheers’ bar, where the sad sack young lead, aptly named Dud (played by 22 Jump Street, Cowboys and Aliens, and Escape from L.A. actor Wyatt Russell) finally finds a place where everyone knows his name. Sean “Dud” Dudley is an update on the 1980s (or 1960s, or 1970s) surfer dude, complete with surfboard and Volkswagen Thing. His lack of money and ambition coupled with his positive attitude and continuous projection of a sense of inner peace makes this update to the archetype all the more real for today.
Three episodes in and we’re still not quite sure where this story will go. Dud and his twin sister Liz, played by Sonya Cassidy(Humans, The Woman in White, Olympus) are a year past the death of their father, who died in a surfing accident off the coast of Long Beach, California, where they still live. Dud can’t move on, so he continues to swim in the pool of his childhood home (until the current residents get a restraining order) and he stifles more than one sale of his dad’s shop (by urinating on the window during a showing by the realtor). Meanwhile Liz is left to work as waiter at the TV version of Hooters, caring only about the tips since the rest of her pay is garnished thanks to her co-signing on her father’s $80,000 debt. She is threatened by her bank, bailed her brother out once to the tune of $3,000 (so far) for taking a loan from a local loan shark, and yet she seems to have her act together as much as that is possible, keeping an apartment where she and her brother can gain a bit of relaxation watching TV on the couch at the end of each crazy, crazy day.
Where does the Lodge of the title come in? That’s the lodge for the “Ancient and Benevolent Order of the Lynx,” a local lodge Dud stumbles across–or was it fate? Will we learn Lodge 49 is really more like Warehouse 13? The eccentric, seemingly immortal Grand Poobah of the Lodge is played by the great Canadian character actor Kenneth Welsh(Twin Peaks, The Fog, Timecop, The X-Files). Other minor roles are filled in by familiar faces, too, like Eddie’s boss, played by master comedic actor Brian Doyle-Murray(Caddyshack, Wayne’s World, Groundhog Day), and the owner of the payday loan shop, played by Joe Grifasi(Splash, Brewster’s Millions, Big Business, Batman Forever). And look for everyone’s favorite genre actor Bruce Campbell and Chuck’sVik Sahay as recurring characters in later episodes. Another big name to know: Paul Giamatti(The Illusionist, Lady in the Water, Paycheck, American Splendor) is executive producer of the show. More trivia? Wyatt Russell is the son of actors Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn, and half-brother of Kate Hudson.
