We’re back. The summer of 2023 is a proper blockbuster movie season, our first in a while. We’ve endured three years of pandemic-related theater closures, unchecked superhero franchise proliferation and a streaming platform cold war that forced too many likely summer blockbusters—The Suicide Squad, The Mitchells vs. The Machines, Black Widow, Luca, The Gray Man—directly onto home screens, where they often fought to hold our attention against the smaller screens in our hands.

Granted, we did go back to theaters a few times in the era of Netflix and COVID, mostly to see event films with titles interrupted by colons—Top Gun: Maverick, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, John Wick: Chapter 4. We did it up, splurging on IMAX 3D, earsplitting DFX sound and even D-Box moving seats, which make films into rides. And, yeah, if that’s the way we want to experience films like Avatar: The Way of Water, we absolutely should spring for that stuff. But in a way, those technological add-ons indicate that we’ve forgotten how movies work.

A night at the movies is entirely different than a night of watching television, no matter how big or loud your home theater is. I’m not disparaging series television, which is astonishingly great right now and only getting better; nor am I suggesting that TV shows can’t look cinematic, or that movies can’t feel episodic. Rather, I’m saying that the experience of going to the movies cannot be duplicated at home.

Seeing a movie in theaters is a focused, encompassing experience. You can’t look at your phone. You can’t hear someone making noise in the next room. You can’t look away from the screen, not really. You’re part of a group that has elected to have an experience together, and you’re vibing on their energy: laughing, screaming, cheering. It’s the difference between, say, watching the Golden Knights from eight feet away on your TV, or watching them at the Fortress from the absolute top of the bowl, as I did a few weeks back. Guess which experience I’m more likely to remember.

What that means for this summer movie roundup is that it won’t include direct-to-streaming movies. Again, that’s not a rebuke of the feature films streaming services will have on offer: I’m as excited to see Netflix’s suspense thriller They Cloned Tyrone and the Apple TV+ stoner comedy High Desert as I am to catch many of the films in theaters this summer. (Although I’m a little worried about the recent report that Apple demanded edits to the opening of Ghosted to better suit algorithm-shaped attention spans.) But we won’t experience those films, only watch them—maybe on the bedroom TV while half-asleep, or on our iPads while making dinner.

Las Vegas is in a good place right now, movie theater-wise. We have a brand-new, stand-alone movie house, Downtown’s Beverly Theater, dedicated to independent, international and revival films. (See Page 23.) And even with the recent closures, Vegas still boasts a giant number of state-of-the-art, crisply air-conditioned cinemas, along with an old-school drive-in—one of only 300 or so still operating in America. The screens are ready, and big movies are coming to fill them up. Let’s go. 

Action

Marvel is first out of the gate with Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3 (May 5), the final chapter for this beloved crew of intergalactic misfits—and also director James Gunn’s farewell to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as he leaves the fold to whip DC’s Extended Universe into shape. Universal follows, a quarter mile at a time, with Fast X (May 19), the penultimate chapter of the Fast & Furious franchise as we’ve known it. That is, it might be; the movie’s tagline is “The end of the road begins.” (It’s precisely the sort of oil-soaked koan Dom Toretto would come up with.) May 26 brings Kandahar, another Gerard Butler potboiler. Hey, somebody’s watching ’em.

June is packed, with Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (June 9) bringing the robots-in-disguise franchise into the 2020s. (Another chapter, Transformers One, is already in production for next summer.) The rest of the month is all icons: Lucasfilm’s fervently anticipated Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (June 30), the last ride for Harrison Ford’s immortal action hero, directed by Logan’s James Mangold; Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part 1 (July 12), another opportunity for Tom Cruise to perform some manifestly dangerous stunts; and Warner Bros.’ long-awaited The Flash (June 16) starring troubled celebrity recidivist Ezra Miller and a raft of DC veterans—Michael Keaton, Ben Affleck and Michael Shannon, among others—in a classic-meets-new crossover event reminiscent of Spider Man: No Way Home.

August roars into play with Gran Turismo (August 11), a based-on-a-game racing movie from director Neill Blomkamp, who hasn’t quite connected since his masterful 2009 film District 9 and is overdue for another hit. It stars David Harbour, Dijimon Hounsou and Orlando Bloom (nice to have you back, Legolas). And on August 18, Warner Bros. delivers its second DC movie in a little over a month with Blue Beetle, featuring Cobra Kai’s Xolo Maridueña as the titular bug man. He’s the first Latino actor to headline a superhero picture, which is pretty cool.

Comedy

A genre that has seen some tough sledding in cinemas since the streamers broke big, comedy makes a real comeback on screens this summer. Book Club: The Next Chapter (May 12) continues the Candice Bergen/Jane Fonda/Diane Keaton/Mary Steenburgen rom-com franchise with a scenic Italian vacay. Fool’s Paradise (May 12) stars It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s Charlie Day in a Being There-like Hollywood satire that also stars Jason Sudeikis, Ken Jeong and the late, great Ray Liotta in one of his final roles. Two regular Vegas comedy headliners release dueling, semi-autobiographical father-and-son comedies on May 26: Sebastian Maniscalco in About My Father, with Robert De Niro; and Bert Kreischer in The Machine, with Corvette Summer star and real-life Jedi Mark Hamill.

June brings two comedies of the variety that Twitter blowhards incorrectly claim “can’t be made anymore” because of “wokeness,” the phantom menace currently driving Ron DeSantis to make a fool of himself. The R-rated Strays (June 9) features cuddly talking dogs voiced by Will Ferrell, Jamie Foxx, Randall Park and Isla Fisher, who hump lawn gnomes, take psychedelic mushrooms and possibly bite off Will Forte’s penis. And it’s been no small number of years since we’ve even heard of a comedy like No Hard Feelings (June 23), which stars Jennifer Lawrence as a cash-strapped Uber driver hired by Matthew Broderick and Laura Benanti to “date the brains out” of their very awkward, extremely virginal 19-year-old son, played by Broadway star Andrew Barth Feldman.

I’m really looking forward to the road trip romp Joy Ride (July 7), the directorial debut of Crazy Rich Asians screenwriter Adele Lim, starring Ashley Park, Sherry Cola, Sabrina Wu and Everything Everywhere All at Once’s Stephanie Hsu—a teaming that won the “Comedy Ensemble” award at last month’s CinemaCon Big Screen Achievement Awards at Caesars Palace. Barbie (July 21) needs no introduction—just an acknowledgment of its Oscar-nominated director Greta Gerwig, and its murderer’s row of a cast: Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, Helen Mirren, Simu Liu, John Cena, America Ferrera and too many more to name. Universal closes this standout comedy season with an as-yet-untitled film from Saturday Night Live sketch ensemble Please Don’t Destroy (August 18), produced by Judd Apatow.

Drama

There was a time, very recently, when I couldn’t say with conviction that all the films on this list would even come to Las Vegas, but the Beverly Theater has decisively changed that. (It comes at a great time, too, as one of the theaters lost in the recent downsizing—Regal Village Square—was the closest thing Vegas had to an indie theater for a long time.) No matter how big or how small, it’s likely that all the films on this list will appear on Vegas screens, so get ready with that #hotindiesummer hashtag.

May 12 brings two intriguing IFC Films releases: BlackBerry, the story of the rise and fall of its namesake mobile device, and Monica, about a woman who comes home to care for an ailing parent. Love Again (May 5) is a romance born in text messages, featuring Celine Dion as herself. Sanctuary (May 25) features Once Upon a Time In Hollywood’s Margaret Qualley as a dominatrix fighting to maintain power in a relationship that bridges sex and business. The Academy Award-nominated co-writer of 2018’s outstanding Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Nicole Holofcener directs the godlike Julia Louis-Dreyfus in You Hurt My Feelings (May 26).

Strongly recommended is A24’s Past Lives (June 2). Celine Song’s directorial debut, starring Russian Doll bestie Greta Lee and an excellent Teo Yoo, is imbued with the stillness, beauty and longing we associate with Wong Kar-wai’s films. It was the first film to play at the Beverly, and it’ll likely be fondly remembered come Oscar season. And, holy smokes, we’ve got a Wes Anderson film coming in hot: Asteroid City (June 23), a pastel-tinted postcard dream starring pretty much everyone who’s ever appeared in an Anderson feature previously.

Every Body, a documentary about the lives and struggles of intersex people from director Julie Cohen (RBG, Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down), releases on June 30. It’s followed by Searchlight’s comedy-drama Theater Camp (July 14), a Sundance-award winner about two friends who step in to run an ailing theater camp when its founder is critically injured in a strobe light mishap.

Finally, July 21 brings Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster drama Oppenheimer, a stylized accounting of the creation of the atomic bomb. There’s no doubt it will be conceptually impeccable and visually arresting, but I’m gonna go further and suggest that it’s likely the only film in this category that will get the D-Box motion-seat treatment.

Suspense and Horror

Confession: I usually can’t see scary or suspenseful movies in theaters, because my partner can’t handle those things. She will punch my leg, hard, whenever things get dicey, and she’ll often ask me urgent whispered questions about the same exact thing I’m watching for the first time. (“Does she die? Is that the killer? What’s going to happen?”) But this crop of chillers and blood-spillers? Too compelling. I’ll take the pain.

20th Century Studios takes the first stab with The Boogeyman (June 2), an adaptation of a classic 1973 Stephen King short story that will probably break Hollywood’s unspoken “don’t let anything bad happen to the kids” rule. The Blackening (June 16), from Barbershop director Tim Story, messes with another timeworn horror movie convention: It has an all-Black cast. (The poster tagline: “We can’t all die first.”)

Horror stalwart Blumhouse drops Insidious: The Red Door, the fifth film in the Insidious series and the first to be directed by franchise star Patrick Wilson, on July 7. A24 throws in its grotesquely embalmed hand with Talk to Me (July 28), a Sundance favorite about a teenaged séance that literally goes to hell. And Disney, not usually an entrant in this category, opens Bad Hair director Justin Simien’s PG-13 Haunted Mansion on July 28. It looks to be more creepily atmospheric and more star-studded (LaKeith Stanfield, Rosario Dawson, Owen Wilson, Danny DeVito, Dan Levy, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jared Leto and more) than the studio’s last, unserious attempt at adapting its beloved theme park attraction with Eddie Murphy in 2003.

Following the muddled reception to last month’s Renfield, Universal might have a found a brilliant way to resurrect its Dracula franchise with The Last Voyage of the Demeter (August 11). Based on the chapter of Bram Stoker’s 1897 epistolary novel that describes daily life on the doomed ship that carries the hungry, hungry vampire to England, Demeter has real knife-fight-in-a-tight-space potential. Hopefully, we’ll have some nerves remaining after that for They Listen (August 25), a John Cho/Katherine Waterston-starring horror flick that’s so scary, its plot synopsis wasn’t even available at press time.

Family

On May 26, Disney fishes up The Little Mermaid, a live-action version of its classic 1989 animated film and, owing to the storytelling and no-you-can’t-without-her-verbal-consent problems of the original, is the first of Disney’s remakes that I’m even remotely interested in seeing first-run. Plus, casting Grammy-nominated Halle Bailey as Ariel and Oscar-nominated Melissa McCarthy as Ursula? Beyond inspired.

Several likely Best Animated Feature nominees land in June. If I were to tell you just how much I’m looking forward to Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, the follow-up to 2018’s groundbreaking Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, I wouldn’t have time to watch it on June 2. Following the disappointing reception to last year’s (not bad!) Lightyear, Pixar makes a likely return to form with the offbeat Elemental (June 16). Dreamworks, engaging in Shrek-like trolling, counter-programs Disney’s mermaid moment with Ruby Gilman, Teenage Kraken (June 30).

June 30 brings an adaptation of Crockett Johnson’s beloved 1955 children’s book Harold and the Purple Crayon. And on August 4, our favorite half-shell heroes Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem resurface in an stop-motion-inspired animated film written by Superbad’s Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, with The Mitchells vs. The Machines’ Jeff Rowe.

Meanwhile, over at the Beverly …

Downtown Las Vegas’ brand-new indie, international and revival cinema (and literary hub, and live music venue), with what is hands down the city’s best concession counter, has an exciting summer ahead of it … though the Beverly Theater’s chief experience officer, Kip Kelly, doesn’t exactly know what that will look like. Not yet, anyway.

“We only book around six weeks out, and that’s by design,” Kelly says. “We’re trying to get data, and we’re trying not to overcommit on runs. It would be easier for us to just say, ‘Here, film, take that eight weeks.’ But we’re not doing that. So, we’re kind of figuring out what our summer looks like.”

Will you get all this summer’s indie films? Will Past Lives return? We don’t know yet. As much as (releasing studio) A24 loves us and we love them, they might commit to a bigger theatrical release than us. … Sometimes studios want to talk to one person who represents 5,000 screens, and that’s all right; that’s how it should go. And I’m OK with that. Past Lives deserves to be blown up.

The St. Patrick’s Day screening of Leprechaun 3 was terrific. Will the Bev present more underground and cult films? We’re looking at some more, yeah. That’s the stuff that excites me the most. We have a lot of really good films that are important for people to see. But the unexpected, curveball out of nowhere, “let’s just have fun”—I really like that stuff.

The Bev’s “Come for the Sound” series, which highlights films uniquely suited to the theater’s outstanding sound system, is pretty cool. Any more special series in the offing? We have a Literature in Film series, which is a Writer’s Block tie-in and a cool matinee opportunity. I wanna do Friday and Saturday closer-to-midnight showings of fun things, some more of that horror stuff that will be part of a Beverly After Dark series—which happens to be an acronym that spells B-A-D, although that’s not on purpose. And we’re working on a cool summer blockbuster revival—a snapshot of some of the bigger openings of the summers from the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s and early 2000s.

The Bev can get Las Vegas excited about the movies again, you know? We’re seeing it happen. I’m looking forward to the day where I lose control of this whole thing—when people just forget about what I’m doing and this place is living and breathing on its own, an electric place to experience cinema and live stuff and literature, with people just showing up. I think we’re on our way there.

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