Considering that the screen industry still holds enough confusion for any 20 industries, the upcoming movie titles have some promise. The fall season is still the fall season, which means it’s the run-up or run-down to awards season late this year and early next.
It means imminent best-of-2024 lists destined for pushback (why does everyone anoint the same favorites?), Golden Globes and the Academy Awards. As always, much of what’ll likely fill the ballots will come out of the international film festival noisemakers this time of year, with events in Venice, Italy; Telluride, Colorado; Toronto and New York City sharing many of the same movies in a six-week blur through mid-October. And then there is, you know, “Wicked.”
Here are 10 titles coming our way. Each provokes a question that only time and your opinion of the movies themselves can answer. Release dates are subject to change, like so much in this life.
“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” (Sept. 6 in theaters): Thirty-six years ago, Tim Burton made a scruffy, inventive ghost comedy and created a uniquely macabre playground for one of Michael Keaton’s finest hours (and a halfs). Now, with many times the original’s $15 million budget, comes a sequel featuring ringers from the original ensemble — and, one hopes, a bigger role for Catherine O’Hara — plus newbies Jenna Ortega, Justin Theroux and Willem Dafoe. The question: Can Burton’s more, more, more sequel avoid swamping the material with digital effects?
“Wolfs” (Sept. 20 in theaters, Sept. 27 on Apple TV+): A botched killing, a couple of rival lone-wolf fixers learning how to get along, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, a little comedy, a little action. Directed by Jon Watts of the recent, pretty zippy “Spider-Man” trilogy, “Wolfs” is going to dink around in multiplexes for a single week before Apple streaming gets it. Clooney and Pitt are not happy about that. The question: Can the fellas and director Watt recapture some of the “Ocean’s 11” magic, wherever people see the results?
“Megalopolis” (Sept. 27 in theaters): Francis Ford Coppola spent $100 million and more on realizing his decades-in-the-oven science fiction fantasy about the clash between art and business, starring Adam Driver as a Howard Roark-flecked architect, Giancarlo Esposito as a corrupt mayor, and a screenful of futuristic imaginings by Coppola and his team. The question: Reviews from the Cannes Film Festival ranged from respectful to not-quite; will the filmmaker’s big gamble find a warmer reception Stateside?
“The Wild Robot” (Sept. 27 in theaters): DreamWorks Animation adapts the Peter Brown bestseller about shipwrecked robot Roz (voiced by Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o) and her education in caring for an orphaned gosling. The question: Can director Chris Sanders manage something closer to the emotional satisfactions of the “How to Train Your Dragon” trilogy than the “Ice Age” movies?
“Joker: Folie à Deux” (Oct. 4 in theaters): The 2019 “Joker” caught the wave of sinister Trump-era vibes, to the tune of a billion-dollar gross, and Joaquin Phoenix won most every best actor award in existence. The question: Can Lady Gaga’s Harley Quinn-in-training, plus director Todd Phillips’ notions of how to make this sequel its own kind of nightmare musical, lead to another hit — and a better one in the bargain?
“Anora” (Oct. 18 in theaters): Writer-director Sean Baker may not be a globally recognized name, but his filmography deserves that recognition, with such brash, humane portraits in street-level, working-class seriocomedy as “Tangerine” and “The Florida Project.” “Anora,” his latest, concerns a Brooklyn sex worker (Mikey Madison) whose engagement to the son of a Russian oligarch leads to trouble. The question: Can Baker keep the streak going?
“Nickel Boys” (Oct. 25 in theaters): This adaptation of the Colson Whitehead novel, inspired by the horrors of a real-life Florida reform school, has a huge challenge to meet, coming as it does in the wake of director Barry Jenkins’ epically superb Amazon adaptation of the Whitehead novel “The Underground Railroad.” The question: Can director RaMell Ross and his team do the source material justice?
“Here” (Nov. 1 in theaters): Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, de-aged and aging as the century-spanning story requires, star in this adaptation of the 2014 graphic novel. The movie’s the product of director Robert Zemeckis; always an early adopter of cinematic technologies, he’s utilizing this time a generative artificial intelligence toolkit known as Metaphysic Live, allowing (don’t ask me how, at least yet) the actors to be de-aged or face-swapped not in post-production, but on set, in “real” time. The question: Does the AI truly help tell this story? Or in 20 years, will “Here” look the way Zemeckis’ “Polar Express” looks to us now? The trailer’s mighty promising.
“The Piano Lesson” (Nov. 8 in theaters, Netflix on Nov. 22): Set in 1936 Pittsburgh, August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama (his second, after “Fences”) starred John David Washington, Danielle Brooks and Samuel L. Jackson in a recent Broadway revival. Now, with Danielle Deadwyler stepping into the female lead, this story of a family heirloom (the piano of the title) and its deep, urgent historical legacy comes to the screen. The question: One that many stage-to-film translations have to answer — can the source material survive and thrive as a movie with a third of its material cut for time?
“Wicked” (Nov. 22 in theaters): The phenomenally popular Broadway musical, winding in and around the storyline of L. Frank Baum’s “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” brings its prologue tale of female friendship sorely and magically tested to the screen. “In the Heights” director Jon M. Chu and his team are halving this project; “Wicked II,” basically the second act of the stage version, arrives in late 2025. The cast is led by Cynthia Erivo (Elphaba) and Ariana Grande (Glinda). The question: Can the movie keep the “Wicked” phenom flying?
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
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