The Amazing Spider-Man (July 3) – The Avengers has already set an incredibly high bar for the superhero film this year. This could mean good or bad for this film, depending on how you look at it. Bad because there will be people might think that if it doesn’t match The Avengers‘ box office take, then it will be a failure. However, it could be good because, logically, no one should be expecting that in the first place so the pressure could be off.
How the film does is another matter. Do people really want to see a new Spidey so soon after the Raimi ones? Will there be enough changes to make it feel like a new movie yet enough of what audiences have come to expect to keep fans happy? -William Gatevackes
The Dark Knight Rises (July 20) – Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy comes to and end, and it will probably face the same kind of expectations that The Amazing Spider-Man does, only with less wiggle room. If you liked the first two films, then quality shouldn’t be an issue. We should be getting a great movie. But it has to live up to the box office expectations of not only this year’s The Avengers (currently the #3 highest grossing domestic film of all time) but also it’s last installment, The Dark Knight (currently the #4 highest grossing domestic film of all time).
The plot is not completely known, but it apparently features a Batman who is facing his greatest challenge in a mercenary named Bane right at the time he thought his job was done. Like I said, it should be a good film, but you can’t help but be sad an era is ending. – WG
The Watch (July 27) – I know that the names Stiller, Vaughn and Hill in the marquee for this film are what is going to drive a number of people to the box office for this action comedy, but what has me anticipating the film is the inclusion of British comic actor Richard Ayoade. Although he is well known to fans of British comedy through his hysterical work on The Mighty Boosh sketch show and the sitcom The IT Crowd and directing the indie film Submarine, I am hoping that the wider exposure that appearing in the film will help establish him as a bigger name here in America.
As the trailers indicate, the film focuses on a quartet of guys in a neighborhood watch program who inadvertently discover and then set out to stop an alien invasion. But since it is these four guys, I’m thinking that the Mayans were off by a couple of months on their whole end-of-the-world prediction thing. – Rich Drees
