Tuesday, February 15, 2005

2005's Steady Diet

According to ScifiDaily, here's a short list of genre films to be released this year:

Robots, March 11

A Sound of Thunder, March 11

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, May 6

Star Wars, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, May 19

Batman Begins, June 17

The Island, July 22

Sky High, July 27

War of the Worlds, June 29

Fantastic Four, July 1

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, July 15

Stealth, July 29

Doom, August 5

Serenity, September 30

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, November 18

The Brothers Grimm, November 23

Underworld: Evolution, December 9

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, December 9

King Kong, December 14

Zathura, December 21

Slated for this year but still without a formal release date is the VERY intriguingly titled Man-Thing.


As usual, there is a hefty helping of sequels and movie-conversions. Not all bad, though; we might pick up a handful of real winners out of this crowd.

3 comments:

ted said...

Let's crunch the numbers, shall we?

There are a total of 15 adaptations from other media including books, television, and video games.

There are four sequels.

There are three movies which are remakes of movies already in existence (I'm not counting FF since the Roger Corman version never made it to mass audiences).

Heck, Harry Potter is both an adaptation and a sequel!

War of the Worlds and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory are both adaptations and remakes!

Batman Begins is an adaptation and a prequel!

Gah!

That leaves Robots, The Island, Sky High and Stealth as the only ones I could not think of source material for. That's four out of 20 movies listed here. Nice. One fifth is not re-hash of something else (and this number is likely wrong since I spent zero time researching the source material for these four). 80% is nothing new. Great. Let me go get my eight bucks each for these movies.

To my own shame I will say that I have seen the trailer for A Sound of Thunder and it appears to have some sort of Baboonasaurus Rex monster wreaking havoc, and this alone makes me want to see it.

By the way, is the CGI family film seeming a little stale to anyone else? With the exception of The Incredibles they are really starting to run together for me.

Tim Lewis said...

Great...Man Thing. The equivalent of DC's Swamp Thing, only he can't talk. Any character that comes from the same plane of existence as Howard the Duck deserves to die a slow, painful death. In case you don't believe me, here's some background bio info. I couldn't find it on Marvel's website, since I'm pretty sure they're trying to forget all about him as well.

Man-Thing

ted said...

I like how he's a monster with feelings. Wait. Man-thing has feelings. No. Feeling Man-thing. No, that's still not it. Man-thing can feel you. Ah, forget it, it's too late in the evening to make this joke work.