From a new-look Superman to followups for Iron Man, Star Trek and The Hunger Games – the forthcoming year promises a plethora of gloriously geek-tastic films
A peek at the top of the box office chart for 2012 gives a fairly clear indication why Hollywood continues to favour genre fare. Of the top 10 performing films from last year, only three drifted outside the fantasy, science-fiction or comic-book film oeuvres, and each of those was an animated movie.
It should come as no surprise, then, that the forthcoming year looks set to offer a plentiful bounty of fanboy-friendly films. In fact, there is so much to look forward to that I hope you'll forgive me for the brevity of some of the descriptions below.
Sci-fi aficionados ought to be in for a particular treat and the lineup of superhero-themed movies also looks extremely promising, with hardly a Green Lantern or Catwoman in sight. On the downside, there are already signs that 2013 could be the year of the unexpected fantasy spin-off you had no idea you actually wanted.
Comic book epics
Last year Marvel gave us The Avengers, Joss Whedon's wry, bombastic take on the ultimate superhero crime-fighting team (at least until Justice League finally turns up). It went on to become the third-highest-grossing movie of all time and the Disney-owned studio will be keen to keep up the momentum in 2013 with Shane Black's Iron Man 3 (April) and Alan Taylor's Thor: The Dark World (October). The former, with Robert Downey Jr returning as Tony Stark to battle Ben Kingsley's Mandarin, looks promising enough with the director of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang in the hotseat. Kenneth Branagh's heartfelt Thor was the surprise superhero hit of 2011: will Taylor, best known for his TV work on Game of Thrones, Deadwood and Mad Men, be able to summon the same boisterous cod-Shakespearean spirit?
Warner Bros, which has Superman reboot Man of Steel ready for takeoff in 2013, is in a very different position to Marvel. Despite ownership of most of DC Comics' iconic characters, its only genuine recent successes on the comic-book front have been Christopher Nolan's Batman films. With the British film-maker vowing to step away from Gotham City for good, a new hero is desperately needed. Zack Snyder's film – due in June – already looks like it will take its subject extremely seriously, with Henry Cavill as a navel-gazing Supes unsure of his place in the world.
A slow-burner, then, but it's probably worth remembering that Richard Donner's 1978 Superman – in many ways the archetypal superhero flick – also took some time to really get going. If Snyder decides to keep his powder dry until the second half of the movie, the final hour ought to be pretty explosive, especially with the excellent Michael Shannon lined up to play Kryptonian villain General Zod. Man of Steel is also tipped to set up the planned Justice League movie, in which case we can probably expect the record for achingly long post-credit sequences to be smashed into oblivion yet again.
Outside bets? Well, 20th Century Fox's The Wolverine, from Walk the Line's James Mangold, really ought to be half decent if only based purely on the law of averages. There have been four films featuring the adamantine-clawed mutant (five if one counts his cameo in X Men: First Class) and while Hugh Jackman has done good work in each of them, we still don't have a classic Wolverine movie in the vault. A trip to Japan (where he will encounter a mysterious figure from his past) in July might just make for exactly the kind of linear, no-nonsense outing we've all been hoping for – 2013's answer to Dredd, perhaps.
October sees the arrival of Sin City sequel A Dame to Kill For, which should be something of a highlight if it can reach the standard of Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller's bloodthirsty, visceral original 2005 hyper-noir. Returnees Mickey Rourke, Clive Owen, Jaime King, Jamie Chung, Jessica Alba and Rosario Dawson are joined – less promisingly – by newcomer Crystal McCahill, a Playboy model.
Into the future
As previously mentioned, 2013 looks like a vintage year for sci fi. On the space opera front, we have JJ Abrams's Star Trek sequel Into Darkness in May, early footage from which suggests another carefully crafted, supercharged take on the well-loved franchise, like a comfy old pair of slippers travelling at warp factor 12. Gavin Hood's Ender's Game arrives in October looking like a gentler take on Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers and featuring a stellar cast that includes Harrison Ford, Hugo's Asa Butterfield and Little Miss Sunshine's Abigail Breslin.
Guillermo del Toro's Pacific Rim, which debuts in July, has already set geek hearts a-fluttering with a fabulous trailer in which giant, human-piloted robots vie to fend off an extra-terrestrial menace. If this is the less ambitious movie which the Mexican film-maker ended up shooting after At the Mountains of Mayhem got canned for being too expensive, it must be wondered just how epic the HP Lovecraft adaptation might have been.
Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity, starring George Clooney and Sandra Bullock, was on my 2012 preview but still hasn't arrived in cinemas. A space psychodrama in the vein of atmospheric 70s fare such as Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris or Douglas Trumbull's Silent Running from the director of Children of Men, it has had bloggers at test screenings drooling in awe. Hold tight for an Autumn release date.
Dystopian visions
With last year's Hunger Games having successfully revived the once-popular subgenre that gave us doom-laden visions of the future such as Soylent Green and Logan's Run (simply by adopting the "genius" stroke of aging down the main characters), 2013 is set to be a year in which devastated landscapes and ruthless autocrats are ever-present on the big screen. First up is sequel Catching Fire, based on the second novel in Suzanne Collins's trilogy of books, which will see the return of Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen in November. This time our heroine is plunged into an even more desperate situation as the powers that be decide to curate an arena in which all the contestants are famous previous winners of the annual Hunger Games. Think Celebrity Big Brother with added guns, knives and Semtex.
Also on the roster for 2013 are Brad Pitt zombie apocalypse flick World War Z, futuristic M Night Shyamalan drama After Earth (featuring Will and Jaden Smith as father and son astronauts visiting a planet that was evacuated by humans more than 10 centuries earlier), District 9 director Neill Blomkamp's return to the big screen with Elysium (with Matt Damon as a 22nd century social crusader), Andrew Niccol's Stephenie Meyer adaptation The Host and Animal Kingdom director David Michôd's's Mad Max-style Aussie post-apocalyptic western The Rover. The future has never looked so bleak and exciting all at the same time.
Fantasy epics
Blame Alice in Wonderland, a pseudo-sequel to Lewis Carroll's colourful 19th-century novel from Tim Burton which , vapid and forgettable as it may have been, nevertheless took more than $1bn worldwide in 2010. Hollywood now seems to be convinced that cinemagoers are longing for an update of the Jack and the Beanstalk fairytale (Jack the Giant Slayer, arriving in March), a prequel to The Wizard of Oz (Sam Raimi's Oz the Great and Powerful, also March) and a sequel to Hansel and Gretel in which the poor little tykes have grown up to be badass killers (Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, February).
Thank goodness, then, for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, the second film in Peter Jackson's current JRR Tolkien fantasy trilogy, which arrives in December. It may be the middle movie in a project that should never have stretched to more than two at the most, but at least it's not Aragorn: The Early Years. At this rate, we can expect that one sometime in 2016.
Which geek-gasmic films do you think will light up the big screen in 2013? Let us know in the comments section below.
Science fiction and fantasy
Action and adventure
Animation
Walt Disney Company
Ben Child
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