.png)
4 hours ago
2
It’s Super Bowl season, which means it’s also time for movie studios to start rolling out trailers for some of the biggest, most anticipated movies of the summer. This week alone has seen the release of the first trailers for Jurassic World: Rebirth, Fantastic Four: The First Steps, and – hold your breath – a new Smurfs movie, joining the Superman trailer that was unveiled a few weeks ago. These are likely to be supplemented by additional Super Bowl ads for Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning and the live-action remake of How to Train Your Dragon, among others.
If this all sounds familiar, well, it should. Unless Disney drops a spot for their upcoming Pixar cartoon Elio, every summer movie receiving the big Super Bowl promo will be a sequel or a high-profile reboot (which is what we’ve been trained to call a remake). This is because just about every big movie coming out in summer 2025 is, yes, a sequel or a reboot of a well-known franchise. The coming attractions include Thunderbolts*, a Marvel entry that looks like a de facto sequel to Black Widow; more traditional follow-ups to Jurassic World, Mission: Impossible, and The Bad Guys; legacy sequels to The Karate Kid and Freaky Friday; reboots of the entire DC Universe (via Superman), as well as the Smurfs and The Naked Gun; a John Wick spinoff called Ballerina; remakes of Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon; and new horror installments in the 28 Days Later, M3GAN, Final Destination, and I Know What You Did Last Summer series.
It’s to the point where a new Fantastic Four movie is attracting the kind of attention typically reserved for something genuinely new and exciting – or at least something not previously adapted to the screen. In reality, this will be (yes) the fourth Fantastic Four movie in 20 years; in other words, there have been as many Fantastic Four movies during that period as Jurassic World installments or movies featuring Superman. Even the reboots are reruns, and they often seem unsure as to whether they’re targeting nostalgia, or simply short cultural memories. Remember the pop singer Katy Perry as Smurfette, the designated girl Smurf? Maybe? Well, anyway, get ready for the pop singer Rihanna as Smurfette, the designated girl Smurf, in a movie where cartoon Smurfs visit the live-action “real” world! Just like they did in the 2011 Smurfs movie and its sequel!
Smurfs notwithstanding, some of these movies will surely be good; even the most dire movie summers tend to have at least one or two big-budget highlights, especially if said summers include a Mission: Impossible entry. And some of them will probably be hits, too, though it may be something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, given how few mainstream alternatives will play on 3,000 screens across North America. Just take a look at the top 20 movies at the North American box office for 2024: 17 of them were sequels or prequels. (Of the remaining three quasi-originals, all were adaptations of bestselling books, one of which was also already a smash Broadway musical with ties to one of the most popular movies of all time.)
Appropriately, we’ve been here before. Sequels and remakes have been a Hollywood staple for almost as long as movies have. Even in the modern era, 2011 also had 17 franchise entries in its top 20, and that didn’t stop subsequent non-sequels like Barbie, American Sniper, Knives Out and the filmographies of Jordan Peele and Christopher Nolan from reaching the upper levels of box office success.
Then again, for those successes to happen, those kinds of movies have to actually come out in theaters. This summer’s slate of mainstream originals again seems to rest with Margot Robbie, who has a romance called A Big Bold Beautiful Journey due in May (no trailer yet, though). There is also some old-school star power from Brad Pitt, whose racing drama F1 bows in June; and Leonardo DiCaprio, who has lent his selectivity to the latest from Paul Thomas Anderson, rumored to be called One Battle After Another – and also rumored to be giving Warner Bros executives agita over the fact that it’s supposedly a little on the weird side, at least for a splashy August release.
Wouldn’t that have made an exciting Super Bowl trailer, though? The first glimpse of a new DiCaprio movie from a major director, with recognizable stars (Regina Hall, Benicio del Toro, Sean Penn) in support, in a story that even film nerds don’t necessarily yet have a bead on? That seems like a project that could make audiences react with some combination of “wow” and “what’s that?” rather than “oh” and “yeah, I remember that one.” Arguably the most famously impactful Super Bowl movie ad of all time was for Independence Day, a movie few people were talking about before it blew the hell out of the White House in early 1996.
Of course, this is all hype-based advertising; not exactly the stuff of pure cinephilia. But for moviegoing to flourish, some of that carny-barker hype is probably necessary, and anyway, it used to be fun to catch a what-was-that glimpse of new movies in between all the ads for cars, beer and Doritos. Even in the streaming era, there’s something powerful about the idea of a trailer going live with the biggest TV event of the year (and then getting streamed and restreamed on YouTube). It’s a powerful tool that studios seem intent on shrugging their way through, hoping that, as with those ads that listlessly employ celebrities to say a familiar line to promote mayonnaise or whatever, the brand name alone will be exciting. A few more summer seasons like this one, and Super Bowl hype for upcoming movies will cease to exist – not splashily blown up like the ID4 White House, but slowly faded and eventually washed away, like a Smurf figurine left out in the rain.
