The second (First part is HERE) half of this list must be taken with a pinch of salt. Right now, given the state of Hollywood movies, there’s a fairly high chance that more than a few of these films won’t actually hit theaters in 2024, if they’re more than six months away. But we can only work with the information at hand. A lot of the smaller or direct to streaming releases won’t even be announced at this point, so this will mainly be the big Hollywood releases listed in this part. Since it’s a shorter list I’m just going to go month by month on this one. But first here is the the full list:
July
Despicable Me 4 – July 4th (Animation)
Twisters – July 19th (Disaster Movie)
Deadpool 3 – July 26th (Superhero/Comedy)
August
Trap – August 2nd (Psychological thriller)
Borderlands – Aug 9th (Video game adaptation)
Speak No Evil – August 9th (Horror)
Horizon: An American Saga Pt 2 – Aug 16th (Western)
Alien: Romulus – August 16th (Horror/Action/Sci-Fi)
Kraven the Hunter – August 30th (Superhero)
September
Beetlejuice 2 – September 6th (Fantasy)
Transformers One – September 13th (Animation)
Wolfs – September 20th (Thriller)
Saw X – September 27th (Horror)
October
Joker: Folie à Deux – October 4th (Crime/Drama/Musical)
Smile 2 – October 18th (Horror)
The Wolf Man – October 25th (Horror)
Terrifier 3 – October 25th (Horror)
November
Venom 3 – November 8th (Superhero)
The Amateur – November 8th (Thriller)
Wise Guys – November 15th (Crime/Drama)
Gladiator 2 – November 22nd (Sword & sandals)
December
The Lord of the Rings: The War of Rohirrim – December 13th (Animation)
Karate Kid Sequel – December 13th (Action/Drama)
Mufasa: The Lion King – December 20th (Animation)
Sonic the Hedgehog 3 – December 20th (Animation/Video game adaptation)
Nosferatu – December 25th (Horror)
July
As we head to the school holidays we get the definitely-not-a-reboot of Twister, “Twisters“, which is being heavily marketed as an “update” to the original film, but doesn’t have the same plot or share any characters with the original. I’m pretty sure that is literally what a reboot is (As opposed to a remake or sequel), but they are very insistent on this one. Go figure, I can’t say I have any interest in this one, but then I wasn’t much of a fan of the original either. This is probably a flop. One movie likely to be a big hit though is “Despicable Me 4“, there’s no indication that the Minions franchise has stopped being a licence to print money, but it wouldn’t shock me if this doesn’t quite hit as high as previous ones. The third installment dropped significantly domestically but more than made up for it with it’s global appeal. It is highly unlikely for this to flop, but whether the franchise can still regularly crack a billion remains to be seen.
Capping off July is the biggest superhero movie of the year, “Deadpool 3“, featuring a full crossover with the Fox X-Men universe and possibly some kind of tie in to the MCU. Most importantly we finally get to see Wade and Logan side by side and played by the actors that made those roles their own, Hugh Jackman and Ryan Reynolds. This will be a big test of superhero fatigue, if this one can’t get close to the billion dollar mark, it may well be over for the genre. It’s worth noting neither of the previous Deadpool movies reached that point, but they didn’t have Wolverine in the mix too. If this came out 4 years ago it would be a dead cert. Now? Who knows. What I do know is I’m almost certainly going to be watching this one.
August
August is a busier month for cinemas, but may end as a month of major flops. At the weaker end of the superhero scale is “Kraven the Hunter“, a movie that seems to have turned the fan favourite Spider-Man villain into a completely different Marvel character, specifically “Ka-Zar”. To be fair Sony probably doesn’t have the rights to Ka-Zar even though he has crossed paths with Spider-Man, but it seems a foolish move to turn such a bad-ass Spidey villain into a empathetic do-gooder. Then again the end goal of the Venomverse seems to be to create Sony’s own “Avengers” film out of Spider-Man villains in a universe without Spider-Man. This movie, like that plan sounds doomed to fail.
August also sees the return of the Aliens franchise with “Alien: Romulus“. Now under Disney control, this franchise is unlikely to go in the direction long term fans would like. My suspicion is we will see something similar to “Prey”, basically duplicating as much as possible from the original movie (Or more likely “Aliens” in this instance) and upping the “diversity” level. The end result will be pointless, vastly inferior, but maybe not awful and so coast on people going “Well it’s not as bad as Covenant” to sell it. Your alternative viewing for mid august though is the second part of Kevin Costner’s epicly long Western “Horizon: An American Saga“, which is unlikely to steal too much of Romulus’ box office. Not because of quality, more just because it’s the second half of a movie and likely 3+ hours long. Definite counter programming there.
The Next Big Thing?
Eli Roth’s “Borderlands” is a movie that may end up one of this years success stories, providing it can convince fans of the game to watch instead of play. I’m only vaguely aware of this game, but it’s clear they’ve been very specific in which characters they’ve chosen to use and which ones to leave out. Fan favourites “Doctor Zed”, “Brick” and “Mordecai” are all absent. Not only that but they cast little Kevin Hart as big tough mercenary “Roland”. If you look up the missing characters and the ones they are focusing on you start to see a theme. Basically they’ve taken a fairly well balanced set of game characters and trimmed it until it basically looks like every other big fantasy/sci-fi franchise of the modern day. That’s all I will say on that. The question is though will any of that matter or will game fans just buy tickets anyway? Many think video game adaptations are the new Superhero movie. We will see I guess!
On the darker side of things though we have a couple of potentially interesting movies. First of all M. Night Shyamalan’s latest from his deal with Warner Brothers, which is a psychological thriller called “Trap” set over one night at a music concert. Shyamalan is consistently inconsistent so that one could go either way. One thing I can say for him though is his films always have interesting premises even if they don’t always live up to their promise. On the horror side of things though is the psychological horror “Speak No Evil“, which is set to test just how long a polite Danish couple can maintain their composure when confronted with madness. Neither of these films are likely to rake it in, but they’ll probably make money.
September
As the kids return to school we get the movie I am probably looking forward to the most in 2024, “Beetlejuice 2″. Of course, whenever a franchise I am particularly fond of makes a sudden return, I balance my excitement with more than a little anxiety. Hopefully it’ll all work out okay. Burton, Keaton and Ryder are all back and they are joined by a cast that includes the great talents of Jenna Ortega (Playing Winona’s daughter) and Willem Dafoe (In an unknown role). Another thing we haven’t seen since the 80’s is a theatrical release of an animated Transformers movie, the first since the franchises theatrical debut in 1986. Can’t say they’ve done a great job of marketing “Transformers One” by declaring it the franchises first animated feature. I mean nothing sells your knowledge of Transformers like forgetting that “Transformers: The Movie” exists.
Joining the list of franchise returns is the tenth entry in the Saw franchise. I haven’t seen any of the more recent entries so I can’t speak too much on where the franchise has been going creatively, but certainly it still seems to bring in a solid box office. I expect this one to make money, though it remains to be seen how much more they can squeeze out of this franchise. There is at least one movie in September that is an original and that is Brad Pitt and George Clooney’s “Wolfs“. A story about two lone wolf fixers assigned to the same job (Which is probably why it is not called “Wolves”). This one is directed by Jon Watts, the man behind the MCU Spider-Man movies. I suspect this will be a decent movie, though I couldn’t guess on its box office.
October
Heading in to my favourite month of the year we get my second most anticipated movie of 2024, “Joker: Folie à Deux“. A lot of people have cast doubt on this one due it it being apparently a musical, yet a lot of people also doubted the first movie (Myself included), until we started getting trailers and then slowly we realized we may have something truly special. That first movie was heavily influenced by the Scorsese films “Taxi Driver” (1976) and “King of Comedy” (1982). Scorsese made a couple of films in between those that I think may give us a clue to where things are heading with this new movie, namely: “New York, New York” (1977) and “Raging Bull” (1980). The former is a musical, but both movies are largely centered around a volatile romantic relationship and this movie is of course introducing us to Harley Quinn (Played by Lady Gaga).
Obviously October means horror so it’s no surprise to see two of the most successful new horrors of recent years make their return with “Smile 2” and “Terrifier 3“. Whether either of these can live up to their previous installments remains to be seen but I have no doubt they’ll both make a killing at the box office (Excuse the pun). Joining those though is Leigh Wanell and Blumhouses latest Universal Horror classic, “The Wolf Man“. Wanell did a great job with his “Invisible Man” reboot and his own “Upgrade” so I am cautiously optimistic about this one. With luck I’ll be able to factor all three of these movies into my October Horrorthon reviews for 2024.
November
As he head towards the end of 2024 we are very much in “Likely to be postponed” territory. But as of the writing of this article, November is slated to present us with the final superhero movie of the year in “Venom 3“. We’re yet to get a trailer for this or any real information about it so I’m hesitant to make any kind of prediction. The first two Venom movies were reasonable enough and fairly popular however coming after two likely clangers in this strange shared universe and with superhero fatigue in full force, this could end up a flop too. Because of this it is even more likely to be pushed into 2025.
The second movie with a huge question mark over it is Ridley Scotts “Gladiator 2“. Which supposedly follows Maximus’ son (Played by the relatively unknown Paul Mescal). While Scott is a great director his output in recent years has been very inconsistent. Again this is one of the more likely movies to get delayed and I can’t make any predictions. November does see a couple of original films that may be worth checking out, first up is “The Amateur“, a thriller from “Slow Horses” James Hawk featuring the talents of Remi Malek. That is followed by a new De Niro gangster movie “Wise Guys“. I don’t know much about either but that casting alone is a big selling point.
December
At last we reach the end of the year, and naturally, anything scheduled for release in December has a good chance of being delayed until the next year. However, first up is the movie, “The Lord of the Rings: The War of Rohirrim,” already delayed from 2022. This is an animated feature, and I believe it is set in the Peter Jackson LOTR’s universe, though, since it is set two and a half centuries before those films, I wouldn’t expect a whole lot of crossover. The story is based on the appendices of the original novels, which means they have a lot of freedom in the specifics. That makes the quality hard to judge because I think we all know how badly Amazon’s LOTR’s TV series ended up. Hopefully Warner can do better than Amazon.
December features three big franchise movies due for release including a mysterious Karate Kid sequel (Title as of yet unconfirmed). It’s unknown if it will fit in with the excellent Cobra Kai TV series or be it’s own thing, but it stars both Ralph Machio and Jackie Chan who took on the Mr. Miyagi type roll in the rather strange remake from 2010. Jackie is of course Chinese and not Japanese and as such uses Kung Fu and not Karate, which always made the remake movie ridiculous. Hopefully the film will address the different fighting styles, but we will see. Following this Disney has it’s latest frachise spin off movie “Mufasa: The Lion King“. Released alongside that and providing obvious competition is “Sonic 3” from Paramount. These films have been good and well received so my money is on the blue guy winning that fight.
A Strange Christmas Present
Last but not least though is another movie I’m looking forward to and that is “Nosferatu” from Robert Eggers. The movie stars Bill Skarsgård as Count Orlok, and features the talents of Willem DaFoe and Nicholas Hoult. The director is the main point of interest though on this one because I can’t think of anyone more appropriate to helm this particular remake. Eggers of course gave us “Witch”, “The Lighthouse” and “The Northman”. His focus on historical accuracy and blending fantasy with reality in a way that leaves a great deal of ambiguity should give us a refreshing take on this remake of a movie that is now 103 years old. While I am certain it will be good, it’s hard to say if it will make money. As good as The Northman was, it flopped in theatres and I’m not sure Christmas Day is the best date for a horror movies release!
So that’s it for 2024. Chances are this later period will have a lot of movies that are just not on anyone’s radar just yet. It’s also worth noting the best movie of last year (In my humble opinion) was Godzilla Minus One, a Japanese movie I didn’t even know was on the cards at the start of the year. So expect one or two surprises. Hollywood has a fairly light card this year due to the impact of last years writers strike. That gives independent and foreign language movies a huge opportunity to showcase themselves, we will see what they do with that opportunity.
Thanks for reading.
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