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A multiverse of radness: Our 2022 summer movie guide

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Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
Marvel Studios

He didn’t mean to do it. Stephen Strange was just doing his job, protecting our reality, when—boom!—he inadvertently opened the doors separating our universe from billions of alternate universes. Those barriers removed, all manner of villains, jerks and insurrectionists began pouring into our universe, bent on wrecking the place.

We already know that bit, because Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness has been in theaters for a week. But what you don’t know is that Strange didn’t just dissolve the barriers inside the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but also the walls dividing Marvel movies from all other movies. Consequently, every film debuting in theaters and on streaming services this summer is part of the MCU—yes, even the DC movie about superhero pets. Top Gun’s Maverick is now a Marvel hero, as are the characters of Downton Abbey. Who can say if the Mighty Thor is ready to face off with the Dowager Countess of Grantham, but he’d better come up with a plan before teatime.

We’re kidding, we hope. All these summer movies occupy their own, individual storytelling universes, as far as we know. But all these films are united in one thing: They’re intended to entertain you through this long, hot summer, whether you experience them in theaters or from your couch at home. (Many of the movies in the comedy and drama categories are debuting on streaming services, which isn’t all that surprising for a universe where Apple TV+ won the most recent Best Picture Oscar.) The doors are open, and the stories are pouring in. It’s time to go to the movies. 

Action

Top Gun: Maverick

Top Gun: Maverick

Doctor Strange might already be out there fighting for humanity, but he’s about to get lots of help. Tom Cruise and Top Gun: Maverick come screaming out of the Reagan era on May 27, with Tron: Legacy and Oblivion director Joseph Kosinski in the co-pilot’s chair. Top Gun: Maverick was first cleared for takeoff in 2020, but the pandemic forced it into a holding pattern; that’s why Kosinski has a second action movie releasing this summer: Netflix’s sci-fi thriller Spiderhead, starring Chris Hemsworth and Miles Teller, dropping onto the service June 17.

Bullet Train

Bullet Train

Speaking of Hemsworth, his much-anticipated reunion with director and giant rock person Taika Waititi, Marvel’s Thor: Love and Thunder, arrives July 8, with Natalie Portman returning to bring the hammer down. They’ll have the arena all to themselves until August, when two more superhero movies will join the fray: Secret Headquarters (August 5), starring the MCU’s Owen Wilson and Michael Peña, and Samaritan (August 26) with Sylvester Stallone. (“All to themselves” comes with an asterisk: The Disney+ Marvel series Ms. Marvel will be near the end of its six-episode run as Thor drops. The Marvel multiverse never sleeps.)

Dayshift

Dayshift

If you prefer non-superpowered, but still somewhat implausible, action, the Brad Pitt vehicle Bullet Train (July 29), directed by John Wick mastermind David Leitch, looks like a winner, though you’ll need to go to a theater to see it. If that’s a nonstarter, Netflix has four more actioners on deck, all very different in tone. The biggest of the batch is the Chris Evans/Ryan Gosling thriller The Gray Man (July 22), which reunites Evans with his Captain America: The Winter Soldier directors Joe and Anthony Russo; Netflix is plainly hoping that the $200 million film, the most expensive picture the streamer has ever produced, will launch a franchise. And hey, if that doesn’t work, they’ve also got Interceptor (June 3), starring Fast and the Furious franchise vet Elsa Pataky, the action comedy The Man From Toronto (August 12), with Kevin Hart, Woody Harrelson and Kaley Cuoco, and Day Shift (August 12), in which Jamie Foxx’s character, a pool cleaner by trade, faces legit vampires.

Jurassic World: Dominion

Jurassic World: Dominion

Last but certainly not least is Jurassic World: Dominion (June 10), which pits the franchise’s own Avengers—Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum from the first trilogy, and Bryce Dallas Howard, Isabella Sermon and Chris Pratt from the second—against a world of dinosaurs runnin’ around all crazy. If Goldblum gets eaten before he can return to Vegas for more smoky jazz, Doctor Strange will have to answer to us.

Comedy

Marcel the Shell With Shoes On

Marcel the Shell With Shoes On

More than any other genre, big-screen comedy seems to have been transformed by the dawn of the streaming era. Half the movies on this list are streamers—and some of them, truthfully, appear to be more mirthful than bust-a-gut funny.

But we’ll give them all a fair shot, because the constant chaos of the multiverse is wearying. We could all use a good chuckle, and if we don’t have to put on non-pajama pants to get it, bonus.

Me Time

Me Time

Netflix leads the pack with three movies. Rebel Wilson and Alicia Silverstone star in Senior Year (May 13), whose director Alex Hardcastle makes the leap to movies after directing lots of episodes of Grace and Frankie, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and more. The Perfect Pairing, a rom-com from the makers of 2019’s Falling Inn Love, bows May 19. And Me Time, an old-fashioned wild weekend comedy starring Kevin Hart, Mark Wahlberg and Regina Hall, drops August 26.

Easter Sunday

Easter Sunday

June 24 welcomes Marcel the Shell With Shoes On, an animated/live action mockumentary that looks like this summer’s stealth hit; it features Jenny Slate, Isabella Rosselini and Nathan Fielder. Broken Lizard’s Jay Chandrasekhar directs Jo Koy and Tiffany Haddish in Easter Sunday (August 5), with Koy playing a fictionalized version of himself. Mack & Rita (August 12) is a body-swap indie comedy starring Elizabeth Lail and Diane Keaton in the same role. And hold on to your zombie butts, because The Bob’s Burgers Movie finally arrives on May 27, fulfilling our nation’s awesome need for witty adult animation and menu-board puns.

Drama

Downton Abbey: A New Era

Downton Abbey: A New Era

This summer’s packed with dramas, which means we have to speed through them like Strange did when he scanned all those possible futures in Avengers: Infinity War. Some are obvious big-screen experiences, like Downton Abbey: A New Era (May 20), the second big-screen installment of Julian Fellowes’ wildly popular British television drama; Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis biopic (June 24), featuring Tom Hanks as Colonel Tom Parker and ascending star Austin Butler as the King; Where the Crawdads Sing (July 15), an adaptation of Delia Owens’ enormously bestselling 2018 novel of the same name, which Taylor Swift loved enough to pen its theme song; and Three Thousand Years of Longing (August 31), an epic romance from Mad Max creator George Miller, starring Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton.

Many of this summer’s other dramas are debuting on streaming services, with limited runs in cinemas. In fact, those runs might be so very limited that these films won’t appear on Valley screens at all. (That trend will almost certainly end when the Beverly Theater opens Downtown later this year.) As you’d expect, Netflix has most of them, starting with Shakespeare in Love director John Madden’s WWII drama Operation Mincemeat, starring Colin Firth (now playing); basketball drama Hustle (June 8), starring Adam Sandler, who co-produced the film with LeBron James; Love and Gelato (June 22), an adaptation of Jenna Evans Welch’s 2016 bestseller; teen romance Hello, Goodbye and Everything in Between (July 6); a fresh take on Jane Austen’s Persuasion (July 15), with Dakota Johnson and Henry Golding; and Purple Hearts (July 29), a wartime romance from Sneakerella director Elizabeth Allen Rosenbaum.

Apple TV+, its shiny red peel still aglow from its Best Picture win for Coda, debuts family drama Cha Cha Real Smooth, starring writer/director Cooper Raiff and summer 2022 drama MVP Dakota Johnson, on June 17. John Cho stars in Don’t Make Me Go, a classic road movie, debuting on Amazon Prime June 13. And two more promising films, the Aubrey Plaza-starring credit card fraud yarn Emily the Criminal (August 12) and Beast (August 19), which pits Idris Elba against a rogue lion, will defy the current wisdom, and possibly multiverse warlord Kang the Conqueror, by actually coming out in theaters. Godspeed, you absolute legends.

Family

Lightyear

Lightyear

The multiverse isn’t always the best place to bring your kids. But it does have its family-friendly spots, nearly all of them animated. (A reminder: Animation is not inherently a medium for children alone; it’s as pure a form of cinema as any other. In fact, animation literally could not exist without a motion picture camera.) And if you’ve missed seeing it on the big screen, Pixar/Disney and Ilumination/Universal have two big, juicy franchise hits for you—respectively, Toy Story offshoot Lightyear (June 17) and Despicable Me prequel Minions: The Rise of Gru (July 1).

More animated films coming to the family space: Netflix’s The Sea Beast (July 8), a fantasy epic from Big Hero 6 director Chris Williams; Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank (July 15), a very, very loose adaptation of Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles; DC League of Super Pets (July 29), featuring the voices of Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Kate McKinnon, John Krasinski, Keanu Reeves and more; Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a big-screen animated installment of the rebooted 1980s franchise, delivered by Netflix on August 5 like so much hot pizza; and Luck (August 5), an original Apple TV+ animated film from director Peggy Holmes, who cut her teeth making direct-to-video stuff for Disney.

Sneakerella

Sneakerella

There are even a couple of live-action musicals in the mix. Sneakerella, a musical Cinderella remix “set in the avant-garde street-sneaker subculture of New York City,” drops on Disney+ on May 13. And 13: The Musical, an adaptation of the all-teenager Broadway hit, appears on Netflix on August 12.

Finally, we have the inexplicable case of Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers, streaming May 20 on Disney+. This Who Framed Roger Rabbit-style live action/animated reboot of Disney’s syndicated 1988 cartoon comes to us via The Lonely Island—yea, the same entity that gave us Palm Springs and “D*ck in a Box.” John Mulaney, Andy Samberg, Seth Rogen, Keegan Michael-Key, J.K. Simmons and others provide voices.

Horror

Outside of franchise reboots, remakes and sequels, horror is the one thing that seems to get people out to theaters in numbers. Small wonder Marvel picked Evil Dead mastermind Sam Raimi to direct Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (taking over for another horror director, Sinister’s Scott Derrickson, who directed the first Doctor Strange movie in 2016). Existent terror sells; it’s the reason we can’t seem to quit Twitter. And the film studios apparently know it, because there’s not one streaming movie in this bunch.

Men

Men

Taste in horror might be subjective, but there are a few auteur-driven movies due this summer that everyone might want to see just for the craft surely to be on display. First and foremost is Nope (July 22) the hotly anticipated third film from director Jordan Peele, who has proven himself an absolute master of the genre in just six short years. Men, coming to theaters on May 20, is Ex Machina director Alex Garland’s first film since 2018’s supremely squirmy Annihilation. Derrickson returns to his dark, dreadful wheelhouse on June 24 with The Black Phone. And while we don’t know what to expect of Halina Reijn’s comedy slasher film Bodies Bodies Bodies (August 5), we can’t deny that the studio that made it, A24, has rarely led us down a dark alley that didn’t have some really interesting blood on its walls.

Also lurking about in the gathering gloom is Bed Rest (July 15), in which an expectant mother faces a continuing nightmare. And Vengeance (July 29) marks the directorial debut of The Office’s B.J. Novak, who also stars in the movie opposite Insecure’s Issa Rae. Considering that we got the Quiet Place franchise the last time someone from Dunder Mifflin tried their hand at horror, Novak has an excellent shot at a hit. A Quiet Place’s John Krasinski is going to have to do something drastic, possibly MCU-related, to get a leg up on him.

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