5. Pitch Perfect 2 (May 15)
Speaking of sequels no one asked for, here’s Pitch Perfect 2! “We’re back pitches”? Hang on, we need to go invent movie poster jail. That’s not a pun, that’s a stroke victim trying and failing to communicate. Calling “We’re back pitches” wordplay is like throwing bacon at someone and calling it a football game. And then the trailer picks up that bacon and runs with it, declaring “the pitch is back” in-between fart noises and stereotypes about Europeans.
Alright, so Pitch Perfect got good reviews and was a box office success. But that was back in 2012, and it’s hard to tell a second story about the same ragtag group of misfits coming together to win the big singing competition without either being repetitive or implying that everyone’s lives fell apart in-between the movies. And seriously, people, you can’t read that tagline and have any hope. Every time we look at it we want to punch, just… all the things.
4. The Transporter Legacy (Jun 19)
The Transporter movies were perfectly generic action movies, the kind of flicks that are great for falling asleep in front of after a night at the bar. They knew their purpose, and they served them well. They did not go down as iconic shoot ‘em ups in desperate need of a reboot.
Yup, it’s a reboot. Not to get pedantic, but the whole point of a reboot is to wipe away the old timeline and start fresh. So what, exactly, is the legacy in this situation? Is hero Frank Martin going to drive really old cars and deliver famous paintings? Is he going to be passing life lessons on how to go vroom vroom and bang bang to his kids? Or is it just a stupid title for a stupid movie starring a British rapper no one in North America has heard of? Because if it’s the latter it will probably be about as successful as the Transporter TV series we had no idea existed right up until five minutes before we wrote this sentence, and no, don’t even try to pretend that you were familiar with it.
3. Hitman: Agent 47 (Aug 28)
Movies based on video games have had mixed results. Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat are fun if you’re with friends and intoxicated, that Prince of Persia flick was watchable if you had literally nothing else to do with your time, and pretty much everything else has been garbage. Okay, that’s not really mixed, but we seem to have picked up The Transporter’sdiction legacy.
But how hard can it be to make a movie based on the Hitman games? A guy in a tuxedo sneaks around and kills people. It’s basically a James Bond movie, if you replace the clever dialogue with more violence and Bond’s personality with a shaved head (that’s used to commit more violence).
It’s apparently harder than it sounds, because they already tried in 2007 and it was terrible.Like, “We’d rather watch The Super Mario Bros. while sober” terrible. Admittedly, that may bode well for this remake/reboot/legacy/whatever, because it would take a truly titanic effort to make Hitman: Agent 47 worse than Hitman: Not Good Enough For a Subtitle. And it stars Rupert Friend! He’s pretty good in Homeland, right? And he’s played a Nazi and one of the jerkier men in Pride and Prejudice! Those are all the qualities you need to be a ruthless assassin! And Zachary Quinto’s in it, he’s cool! Hey, maybe this won’t be so bad after… ugh, we can’t even finish that thought. It’s going to be dumb, you guys. So, so dumb.
2. Victor Frankenstein (Oct 2)
You’ve recoiled in terror at the classic story of Frankenstein’s monster trying to fit into a world where he doesn’t belong. You’ve recoiled in a different kind of terror as Aaron Eckhart slummed his way through I, Frankenstein, where the iconic creation battled demons, his own tortured soul and every lesson ever taught by every film school. Now learn the gritty origins of the doctor who created the monster in a movie that apparently doesn’t feature the latter character that people actually care about in Victor Frankenstein, starring Professor X as Victor and Harry Potter as his hunchbacked but still dreamy assistant.
Told from Igor’s perspective, we see the troubled young assistant’s dark origins, his redemptive friendship with the young medical student Viktor Von Frankenstein, and become eyewitnesses to the emergence of how Frankenstein became the man who created the legend we know today.
Become eyewitnesses to the emergence of how Frankenstein became a mad scientist? Heck, you don’t need a two hour movie to learn that backstory. We can tell it to you right now: “Who the hell cares? Dude’s a mad scientist.”
That’s not us being flippant, that’s us reflecting the collective critical and commercial shrug given to Dracula Untold, the origin story of everyone’s favorite bloodsucker. Spoiler alert: it was dark and gritty but also intended to arouse sympathy. Bet you didn’t see that coming, huh?
There’s a reason most adaptations of Frankenstein and Dracula don’t give us summaries of the title characters’ college years, and that’s because it doesn’t matter. It’s the classic prequel trap. You already know what’s going to happen to the character, especially one as famous and straightforward as Dr. Frankenstein. So does it really matter how he gets there? The optimists among our readers would say yes, but anyone who had to suffer through Dracula Untold is scrawling “NO” on their monitor in blood.
1. Jem and the Holograms (Oct 23)
We’re going to let Wikipedia lead on this one. “Jem and the Holograms is an upcoming 2015 American live-action romantic musical fantasy comedy-drama film based on the toy line and 1980s animated television series of the same name.”
Did you get all that? A live-action romantic musical fantasy comedy-drama based on a toy line and, oh yeah, some TV show half the audience has forgotten and the other half never heard of in the first place. We’ll say it once more, to really let it sink in. A romantic musical fantasy comedy-drama based on a toy line. That’s not a movie, that’s a marketing executive’s erotic dream.
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