Summer 2017 Blockbusters

The weather is getting warmer and the superheroes have already seized the box office, so that must mean that summer blockbuster season is upon us. We have already had guardians, aliens, pirates and even lifeguards. May kicked the season off in a big way with Guardians Of The Galaxy Volume 2 and Alien: Covenant. The first is James Gunn’s sequel to his smash hit 2014 film Guardians Of The Galaxy and the second is Ridley Scott’s anticipated new entry in the sci-fi series, which slots into the overall story between 2012’s Prometheus and 1979’s Alien. Plus, as I write this, we are preparing for the opening weekends of the television-to-film adaptation of Baywatch starring Dwayne Johnson and Zack Effron, as well as Johnny Depp’s return to the character of Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales.

June promises to be a jam-packed month of movies, starting with the long-awaited Wonder Woman feature film, which is the popular comic book character’s first leading live action role since the television series in the ’70s. Another sure-to-be-a-hit superhero film pops up in June, and that movie is Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie, an animated family movie based off of a series of children’s books. Captain Underpants is a school principal who is fooled into believing he is a superhero. Following the superheroes, June gets into some other exciting terrain with The Mummy and Cars 3; this time The Mummy features Tom Cruise facing off against a female character as the titular mummy, while in Cars 3 Lightning McQueen must prove himself a champion racer to a younger generation of race cars.

The month of June lumbers on with Transformers: The Last Knight, the fifth film in Michael Bay’s series of Transformers movies, which finds the robots searching for an artifact on Earth that could help to save their thought-to-be-dead planet of Cybertron. And as if that wouldn’t be enough, June keeps the big titles coming with the comedies Despicable Me 3 and The House. In the third Despicable Me film, Gru discovers he has a twin named Dru while The House stars Will Ferrell and Amy Poehler as parents who cannot afford their daughter’s college tuition so they decide to open an illegal casino in their house.

July starts big with the much-anticipated Spider-Man: Homecoming, the first feature in the Spider-Man franchise to tie into the now established Marvel Universe so that Spidey can interact with the rest of our favorite characters. We follow that up with War For The Planet Of The Apes, which is the third film in the rebooted Planet Of The Apes franchise and this time deals with the ape Caesar and his own struggle with his dark side. Things don’t get lighter from there, as July’s next big film is Christopher Nolan’s World War 2 epic Dunkirk, a story about a dire battle in which soldiers from Belgium, Britain, Canada and France become surrounded by German forces. But don’t fret, families, because July isn’t all dark as Columbia Pictures will release their animated family film The Emoji Movie, a story about a “Meh” emoji trying to find his way in the world.

We wrap up the summer months with August’s offerings, which start off with one of the most anticipated fantasy films of the last few decades with the big screen adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower, an epic dark fantasy adventure in which Roland “The Gunslinger” roams a parallel dimension in search of “The Man In Black” and the mythical Dark Tower. While not your typical blockbuster, we will also get the newest film from Kathryn Bigelow, Detroit, about a controversial police raid in 1967, which caused one of the United States’ largest citizen uprisings.

The Halloween season starts early this year with the August release of Annabelle: Creation, the sequel to the 2014 Annabelle, which itself was a spinoff from the hugely popular 2013 film The Conjuring. In this installment, the aptly titled Annabelle: Creation explores the origin of the possessed doll of the series’ title. And finally for this list we come to the August release of The Hitman’s Bodyguard, an action comedy with a star-studded cast that features Ryan Reynolds, Gary Oldman, Salma Hayek and Samuel L. Jackson. The Hitman’s Bodyguard is about a hitman set to testify at a high profile trial and the bodyguard hired to protect him, even if they hate each other.

So there you have it, the summer of 2017 will offer a great variety of films for moviegoers. And those were only the titles we expect to be big hits.