By Zachary Adler:
Summer is always the the most important season in Hollywood. Between Memorial Day and Labor Day, the film industry releases blockbuster after blockbuster, expecting to hit gold with all of them.
This summer, that didn’t exactly happen. But, as usual, Hollywood looks to the fall lineup of films to save itself from the self-praising studios like to give themselves, in preparation for giant wave of boastfulness that is the awards season, especially the Oscars. And this fall, it looks like the studios have prepared themselves well for that tremendous task.
Drama
If there’s one thing the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences loves, it’s well-known actors in heart-wrenching dramas. They also crave epic historical dramas and period pieces by famous directors that you can give interesting introductory speeches about, especially if those movies are up for the coveted Best Picture Oscar. There are plenty of films that fit right into either of these molds in the running that come out this fall. The film with most potential being George Clooney’s The Monuments Men, which stars Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, Jean DuJardin, Bob Balaban and Hugh Bonneville as architects and artists during World War II who assist the Americans avoid the destruction of Europe’s entire culture.
Comedy
The genre that Oscars often yearns to hate is comedy, but this fall there looks to be a few comedies that will turn some heads in audiences. The first is The World’s End, which stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost in the conclusion of the trilogy that included Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, where a group of friends have to do a pub crawl in a city infested with robots. But the monumental comedy of this season, and perhaps this decade, is the return of Will Ferrell in Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues. Now, there is no need to explain how amazingly funny Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy was all the way back in 2004, and this looks to continue the tradition, along with a bevy of guest stars.
Action, Thrillers, and Blockbusters
And still, there are the action movies and thrillers. There’s the Stallone-ScBig-buhwarzenegger team-up of Escape Plan, Ridley Scott’s criminal thriller The Counselor, Sandra Bullock in space in Gravity, the return of Vin Diesel in Riddick, and best of all, Hugh Jackman in the vigilante thriller Prisoners. Though these probably won’t get much attention from the Oscars expect in the visual departments. That being a stretch considering the two big contenders for fall’s biggest profits, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, strike to steal the fall and early winter from everything else following the previous films in their respective franchises.
Regardless of age or interest, there appears to be at least one movie out there for everyone, following some heated debates over who will be leaving with gold statuettes in March.dget films had trouble in the domestic box office, and even reliable franchises were greeted with little more than a whimper from moviegoers. This series of commercial flops went to the extent where Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were claiming that the studio system was on its last limbs.
