Twihards everywhere. Plus there are new takes on The Sweeney, Total Recall, Gambit, Anna Karenina, The Three Stooges.
And at the very end of the year, Peter Jackson, nine years after he last laid down his Oscar-winning Tolkien wand, takes it up again to bring The Hobbit to the big screen.
With the Harry Potter franchise finally put to rest after 10 years and eight films, that’s one movie series dead cert less for future box office glory. So where will cinemagoers be going for honey over the next few months?
As 2011 bowed out with Mission: Impossible 4, or Ghost Protocol as officially subtitled, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Hollywood’s first tilt at the Swedish Millennium trilogy, it’s clear that recycling is still Tinseltown’s favourite standby.
Witness Underworld: Awakening, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, Streetdance 2, Wrath of the Titans, American Pie: Reunion, Men in Black 3, GI Joe: Retaliation, The Amazing Spider Man (actually a complete reboot with Andrew Garfield as Spidey), Ice Age Continental Drift and The Dark Knight Rises, all released in the first half of the year.
With at least eight of the above titles boasting 3-D it’s also plain that the eye-popping process which many wrote off as just a short-term fad still seems to be alive, well and justifying stonking ticket price rises.
Later in the summer we find more
Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Step Up, Resident Evil, Taken, Expendables, Bourne, Madagascar and, of course, Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 2 for
COMING SOON: Martin Freeman as Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, above; Andrew Garfield as The Amazing Spider Man, left; Ray Winstone
and Ben Drew in The Sweeney, right; and Sylvester Stallone and the gang from
The Expendables 2, below