21 Movies We Can’t Wait to See This Summer

Summer is the season of escape, and boy, is there a lot to escape from right now. Over the next three-plus months, there will be plenty of opportunities to forget your troubles at the theater (or on the couch, where Netflix and Hulu bid to keep you planted). Sequels and remakes abound, as they so often do this time of year; save a spot on your dance card for the new and ongoing adventures of Ethan Hunt, Happy Gilmore, Lilo, Stitch, Lindsay Lohan, and the Predator. Not hoping to feel good? Ari Aster and Danny Boyle have cooked up the counterprogramming with some unseasonably bleak thrills. And for those whose tastes run more art house than multiplex, favorites from Sundance, Cannes, and Toronto beckon.

Below, we’ve singled out 20 new releases on the horizon: the big-budgets epics, the resourceful indies, and the pure comfort food on the way this summer. We’re feeling optimistic — about the movies to come, if not about much of anything else.

May

Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning

May 23
In theaters

Don’t sweat the subtitle, Ethan Hunt heads. “Final” probably means about as little as “impossible” has over the course of this franchise’s peerless three decades of espionage thrills. Part eight picks up where part seven left off three summers ago with the most tireless secret-agent man in American intelligence still tracking down a malevolent algorithm (and no, we’re not talking about Netflix, famed enemy of the fabled big-screen experience Tom Cruise still believes in). But continuity has always seemed an optional buy-in with M:I. A taste for elaborate, foolhardy, daredevil stunts is the only real prerequisite.

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The Phoenician Scheme

May 30
In theaters

Stylistically, you know what you’re getting with Wes Anderson. Of course, there are variations distinguishing each of his whirligig contraptions from the next. In the case of his latest caper, which follows a wealthy mogul (Benicio del Toro) and his young heir (Mia Threapleton) to his empire, that’s partially a matter of casting: Riz Ahmed and Michael Cera are among the new players ushered into his ever-growing troupe. There was also intriguing advance word that del Toro would appear in every shot of the movie, though the (typically dazzling) trailer suggests that maybe Wes thought better of this limitation. Regardless, The Phoenician Scheme has to be considered one of the moviegoing events of the summer, at least for those capable of telling, say, an Asteroid City from an Isle of Dogs.

Also coming in May

➼ Lilo & Stitch (May 23)
➼ Fear Street: Prom Queen (Netflix, May 23)
➼ Fountain of Youth (Apple TV+, May 23)
➼ The Last Rodeo (in theaters May 23)
➼ Bad Shabbos (in theaters May 23)
➼ Karate Kid: Legends (in theaters May 30)
➼ Bring Her Back (in theaters May 30)
➼ Bono: Stories of Surrender (on Apple TV+ May 30)
➼ Tornado (in theaters May 30)

June

The Life of Chuck

June 6
In theaters

From this past winter’s grotesquely comic The Monkey to this fall’s dystopian The Long Walk to Edgar Wright’s forthcoming remake of The Running Man, 2025 is shaping up to be a crowded year for Stephen King adaptations. The latest of the author’s stories to make the leap to the big screen is uncharacteristically unspooky; it’s a three-part metaphysical fable, told in reverse chronological order, which starts with the apocalypse and works its way backward to a coming of age (with Tom Hiddleston cutting a rug somewhere in between). Winner of the Audience Award at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, The Life of Chuck is King at his most sentimentally philosophical. It’s also among the more ambitiously faithful movies made from his work — a real speciality of writer-director Mike Flanagan’s, who also managed to wrestle Gerald’s Game and Doctor Sleep into cinematic form.

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Predator: Killer of Killers

June 6
Hulu

For the most fearsomely camouflaged game-hunter in the galaxy, the Predator is looking awfully visible these days. He’s back this year with not one but two new sequels from Dan Trachtenberg, who previously took the sci-fi franchise into the 18th century via Prey. For his next twist on the formula, the director arranges an animated anthology around the big guy; each of the three stories pits him against a different human soldier (a Viking, a ninja, a WWII pilot) in a different time period. Want more of the dreadlocked sportsman still? He’s supposedly the main character (a first for the series) in Trachtenberg’s live-action Predator: Badlands, coming this autumn. Your move, Xenomorph.

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Materialists

June 13
In theaters

Few debuts this decade were as conceptually ambitious as Past Lives, playwright Celine Song’s bittersweet tale of childhood sweethearts reconnecting over multiple years and continents. For her second feature, Song traces another love triangle, this one starring Dakota Johnson as a professional matchmaker torn between two handsome suitors, one played by Pedro Pascal, the other by Chris Evans. The mainstream sheen of Materialists has been greeted with grumbles, as though the film’s very title betrays strictly sellout motives on Song’s part. But it’s not like we’re drowning in date movies for adults. And there are worse ways to spend your career capital than rescuing three talented actors from the shackles of Marvel-superhero duty. The movie looks charming enough to stave off a sophomore slump and maybe to leave a wider audience as swoony as Past Lives left critics.

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28 Years Later

June 20
In theaters

It’s been nearly, well, 28 years since Danny Boyle gave zombie cinema a jittery digital makeover while irking the Romero faithful with his sprinting hordes of agile infected. Now the director has reunited with screenwriter Alex Garland for a second standalone sequel (neither were involved with the last one, 2007’s down and dirty 28 Weeks Later) that sends a father and son into a world still overrun with vicious ghouls, as well as survivors who might be even more dangerous than the undead. Just don’t expect a homecoming in front of the camera: Reports that recent Best Actor winner Cillian Murphy was also returning to the franchise proved premature. Nonetheless, we’re ready to run, not shamble, back into Boyle and Garland’s graveyard future; their vision of humanity annihilated by rage has only grown more disturbingly relevant since the less apocalyptic days of 2002.

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Elio

June 20
In theaters

What alienated kid hasn’t dreamt of aliens? Who among us hasn’t looked to the stars and yearned to be whisked off to a brighter frontier? That’s the gist of Pixar’s Elio, the story of a preteen boy who prays to be liberated from the doldrums of terra firma and finds himself in way over his head once the obliging E.T.s mistake him for ambassador to Earth. More than the premise, it’s the pedigree that has us excited: The film comes courtesy of the directors of Coco and Turning Red, a.k.a. two of the better Pixar adventures since back when everything the studio touched was gold.

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F1

June 27
In theaters

Like Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt is an eternal marquee draw — an ageless superstar capable of opening a movie no matter what’s going on in his life when the cameras aren’t rolling. Perhaps that’s why Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski signed on to F1, which casts Pitt in the rather Maverickish role of a veteran race-car driver who comes out of retirement to train a promising young hotshot (Damson Idris). The plot appears to be pure sports-movie pap, but that might not matter much when the movie is on the track; the racing sequences look like visceral pageants of rubber and steel, putting you in the driver’s seat as fully as Kosinski’s last star vehicle stuck the audience in the cockpit.

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Sorry, Baby

June 27
In theaters

Heavy subject matter, unusually light touch. That’s the singular appeal of Sorry, Baby, the directorial debut of Eva Victor, which premiered to rave reviews at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and then got scooped up by A24 after a bidding war. The actress, comedian, and social-media star casts herself as a college professor sorting through a traumatic event from her past; the script, which jumps around in time, threads the story through Victor’s dryly loopy sensibilities, approaching the character’s destabilized life and her relationships with a surprising breadth of humor. Sorry, Baby, which counts Moonlight’s Barry Jenkins as a producer, failed to take home the fest’s top prize, but nothing there provoked more conversation and admiration.

Also premiering in June

➼ From the World of John Wick: Ballerina (in theaters June 6)
➼ I Don’t Understand You (in theaters June 6)
➼ The Ritual (in theaters June 6)
➼ Barron’s Cove (in theaters June 6)
➼ Dangerous Animals (in theaters June 12)
➼ How to Train Your Dragon (in theaters June 13)
➼ Echo Valley (in theaters June 13)
➼ Bride Hard (in theaters June 20)
➼ Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore (in theaters June 20)
➼ Sovereign (in theaters June 20)
➼ Familiar Touch (in theaters June 20)
➼ Happyend (in theaters June 20)
➼ M3GAN 2.0 (in theaters June 27)

July

Jurassic World Rebirth

July 2
In theaters

Creatively speaking, Jurassic World Dominion was an extinction-level event for this franchise. So why are we excited for Rebirth, which sends yet another party of tasty humans (among them Scarlet Johansson and Mahershala Ali) into the jaws of prehistoric danger? Mainly because part seven has fallen to Gareth Edwards, director of such majestic blockbusters as Rogue One and the 2014 Godzilla, a grand, big-budget kaiju spectacle with quite a few nods to the original Jurassic Park. Edwards, in fact, is one of the few modern Hollywood filmmakers with a genuinely Spielbergian command of scale and perspective. With him behind the camera, we’ll make like the characters and head back to the lost world.

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Superman

July 11
In theaters

The Man of Steel is dead, long live the Man of Steel. From the ashes of the Snyderverse rises a sunnier Superman (newcomer David Corenswet), the North Star of Marvel defector James Gunn’s master plan to reboot the DC movie universe. His Superman promises quippy robots, giant monsters, a spunky Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), a diabolical Lex Luthor (Nicolas Hoult), The Daily Planet, the Fortress of Solitude, a legion of lesser superheroes, and an adorable CGI superdog named Krypto. But most winningly, what it seems to offer is a bright beacon of hope, just like the one Christopher Reeve once played. A lovable Superman? What a concept!

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Eddington

July 18
In theaters

Ari Aster probably could have spent the rest of a healthy career making black-hearted horror movies like Hereditary and Midsommar. Instead, this antagonistic virtuoso has started letting the sticky dark feelings fueling those nightmares seep into other genres. His latest is being billed as a modern western with his Beau Is Afraid star Joaquin Phoenix as a New Mexico sheriff squaring off against the local mayor (Pedro Pascal) during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Is it too soon to rub our noses in that dark chapter? Maybe, but if there’s anyone capable of capturing the sheer apocalyptic ugliness of America circa 2020, it would be Aster.

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The Fantastic Four: First Steps

July 25
In theaters

Speaking of Pedro Pascal, he is everywhere. Miss him in Materialists, Eddington, and the new season of The Last of Us, and you can still catch him stretching his CGI limbs as Reed Richards in Marvel’s latest attempt to make marquee attractions out of its first family. Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, and Joseph Quinn round out the roster of astronauts turned celebrity superheroes defending an alternate Earth from the planet-devouring Galactus. It won’t take much for this Fantastic Four to clear the low bar set by previous big-screen incarnations of the characters. The real trick will be blowing some breezy, retro fun into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a franchise that could really use a reset, or at least a new glimmer of the, well, fantastic.

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Happy Gilmore 2

July 25
Netflix

Adam Sandler has made fewer sequels than you’d think. Though he’s treated his career like a content factory (especially since he hooked up with Netflix, which has really kept the assembly line rolling), the comedian doesn’t often reprise an old role … which makes it intriguing to see him slip on the jersey for a very belated follow-up to one of his earliest hits. But does the Sandman still have the fire in him to play a hockey player turned golfer powered by his hair-trigger temper? There are few outbursts in the surprisingly relaxed trailer, which floats the odd (if oddly heartening) prospect of an adjusted Happy Gilmore, returning to the sport but not to brawling on the green. Time apparently makes softies out of even the most belligerent man children.

Also premiering in July

➼ The Old Guard 2 (on Netflix July 2)
➼ Heads of State (on Amazon Prime Video July 2)
➼ Zombies 4: Dawn of the Vampires (on Disney+ July 11)
➼ I Know What You Did Last Summer (in theaters July 18)
➼ Smurfs (in theaters July 18)
➼ Together (in theaters August 1)

August

Naked Gun

August 1
In theaters

Nothing to see here! Please disperse! It’s just Frank Drebin — no, not the accident-prone cop the late Leslie Nielsen played on both the big and small screen for the better part of two decades. The badge has passed to his equally hapless son (Liam Neeson, scoring the role by dint of deadpan gruffness but also maybe because he has a very similar name). The first trailer for this legacy sequel, featuring one very sly O.J. Simpson joke, suggests that director Akiva “The Lonely Island” Schaffer and producer Seth McFarlane very much understand the gag-a-second assignment. But will Naked Gun amount to more than a hill of beans in the box-office landscape of 2025? Who cares! This is our hill. And these are our beans.

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Freakier Friday

August 8
In theaters

On the subject of belated legacy sequels to comedy hits, Disney is banking that the zany pleasures of the body-swap genre haven’t gone totally out of fashion since 2003, when Freaky Friday premiered. Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan reunite as mother and daughter, cosmically compelled to trade places. The twist of this sequel to a remake is that Lohan’s character is now all grown up with a daughter and stepdaughter of her own; all four women end up zapped into a different body, doubling the game of metaphysical musical chairs. Sounds like fun for the whole multigenerational family, if maybe a touch more convoluted than the simple one-to-one lesson in empathy the last Freaky offered.

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Weapons

August 8
In theaters

The twisty Barbarian marked Zach Cregger as a writer-director with real structural brio. From the looks of it, he’s gone bigger and even bolder with his follow-up: a mysterious thriller starring Julia Garner (a month out from her role in Fantastic Four) as a teacher whose entire elementary-school class wanders off into the darkness one night, making her a target for angry, confused parents. Depending on who you ask, it’s either exciting or concerning that Cregger has cited Paul Thomas Anderson’s sprawling, three-hour Magnolia as an influence. Ditto the fact that he secured final cut on the film after a contentious bidding war. Whatever’s really going on with the missing kids, something tells us that Weapons might be aiming for a larger point about educational witch hunts — a timely topic in the hellscape America of 2025.

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Highest 2 Lowest

August 22
In theaters

September 5
Apple TV+

“The new Spike Lee joint” should be enough to pique anyone’s interest. But if you need more reason to mark your calendars, Highest 2 Lowest is the first movie Spike has made with Denzel Washington since Inside Man nearly 20 years ago. The Oscar winner plays a mogul forced to choose between his empire and the life of a child — an ethical dilemma lifted from a novel by Evan Hunter and the 1963 Akira Kurosawa adaptation of the same, High and Low. One legendary director covering another is a must-see proposition, especially in the dog days of August — the same release corridor Lee blessedly staked out with BlacKkKlansman a few summers ago.

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Eden

August 22
In theaters

Nuttiness is generally not a quality one should expect from a new film by Ron Howard, the former child actor turned Hollywood director of such quintessential Dad Movies as A Beautiful Mind, Cinderella Man, and Frost/Nixon. But it’s a touch of madness that earns his latest the Vulture stamp of approval. Jude Law, Vanessa Kirby, Ana de Armas, Sydney Sweeney, and Daniel Brühl are among the stars gone enjoyably unhinged for this true story of melodramatic conflict among the European settlers of a Galápagos island. “He’s finally allowed himself to lose his mind,” our own Bilge Ebiri wrote of the filmmaker after catching Eden on the festival circuit last fall, before adding that “it might be the best decision he’s made in years.” Someday, perhaps, we’ll forgive him for the worst.

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Caught Stealing

August 29
In theaters

What a good title for a crime thriller about a former baseball player (Austin Butler) gone dirty in ’90s New York. And what a stacked cast that includes Regina King, Liev Schreiber, Zoë Kravitz, Griffin Dunne, Vincent D’Onofrio, Carol Kane, and the rappers Bad Bunny and Action Bronson. Adapted by Charlie Huston from his own novel, Caught Stealing has the look of a real change of pace for director Darren Aronofsky, who’s taking a break from biblical parables (Mother!, Noah) and tales of bodily abuse (The Wrestler, The Whale) to indulge in the kind of stylish underworld picaresque that was all the rage around the time he was rising to prominence. Aronofsky, a native Brooklynite, has promised lots of offbeat NYC characters. An outrageously mohawked Matt Smith might just be the tip of the iceberg in that department.

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The Toxic Avenger

August 29
In theaters

Two years after it premiered to roars of grateful festival applause, Macon Blair’s remake of the cult Troma splatter comedy The Toxic Avenger is finally getting a release. Why the long delay? Word is that many distributors balked at the excessive gore — which is, of course, why it counts as the late-breaking movie event of the season for a certain breed of sicko. Those outside the Lloyd Kaufman fan club may still be curious to see Peter Dinklage in the title role of a meek slob janitor who starts really cleaning up the city after an accident with radioactive waste transforms him into a deformed vigilante. Toxie is the late-summer antidote to superhero fatigue — a dose of crude B-movie diversion to bridge blockbuster and awards season.

Also premiering in August

➼ The Bad Guys 2 (in theaters August 2)
➼ Sketch (in theaters August 6)
➼ Fixed (on Netflix August 13)
➼ Nobody 2 (in theaters August 15)
➼ Honey Don’t (in theaters August 22)
➼ Americana (in theaters August 22)
➼ Relay (in theaters August 22)
➼ Clika (in theaters August 25)
➼ The Roses (in theaters August 29)