Robert Hamer
Did you know 2025 is a ‘WTF’ Year? That’s a year that begins on a Wednesday, making the acronym of the first three days of the year, literally, “W,” “T,” and “F.” Some superstitious folks would have you believe that this is a bad omen for the year, but that’s just silly. The last few ‘WTF’ Years weren’t all that bad: 2020, 2014, 2003, 1997, 1986, 1975, 1969 and oh god we are in for a rough year wow now I’m bummed out okay let’s just get to some previews of upcoming releases…
WOLF MAN – In Theaters January 17
Directed by Leigh Whannell
Starring Christopher Abbott, with Julia Garner and Matilda Firth
What is it about? A family at a remote farmhouse is attacked by an unseen animal, but as the night stretches on, the father begins to transform into something unrecognizable.
How am I feelin’ about this one? Remember the “Dark Universe?” Of course you do. How can anyone forget the hilariously misconceived multi-film franchise that Universal Pictures tried to cobble together to ride Marvel’s coattails that started with Dracula Untold The Mummy and ended with that same movie after it tanked at the box office? Remember how we all reacted to plans to assemble classic Universal Monsters from the 1930s and 40s as some superhero team-up to eventually take on Cthulhu with derisive laughter and second-hand embarrassment? The whole thing is still a punchline to this day, and deservedly so.
One of those iconic monsters they were planning on rebooting as a superhero was the Wolfman, and their top choice was rumored to be, no kidding, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. That idea fell apart pretty quickly. Because of course it did. Then the Universal higher-ups said “Oh screw it,” hit the ABORT button, and made the shocking decision to hire Leigh Whannell to just make a good standalone horror movie on a reasonable budget with real human stakes. That worked out well, which motivated them to move on a pitch from Ryan Gosling to produce a Wolfman reboot in a similar vein. But then he and his first choice for director, Blue Valentine’s Derek Cianfrance, dropped out, so they went back to Whannell and asked if he could work his Invisible Man magic to revive this near-dead project.
That’s quite a tangled path to a finished film, but anyone who knows their film history knows that a rocky production alone doesn’t doom a project. Still, there is something a little worrisome about Gosling and Cianfrance jumping ship on an idea that seemed to legitimately excite the higher-ups at Universal. The Invisible Man was good but wasn’t without its flaws, and I feel like trading a big-budget franchise farrago with a series of more respectable but increasingly repetitive and not-entirely-appropriate allegories for domestic abuse isn’t an across-the-board positive tradeoff.
One tradeoff I do not actually consider much of a downgrade is seeing Christopher Abbott taking on the Gosling role of the man becoming the titular beast. I have become quite a fan of this actor, who, despite his unassuming doe-eyed face, has found himself excelling as intense or unsettling characters. He did a fantastic job carrying James White, let both Mia Wasikowska and Margaret Qualley top him in low-budget Weird Sex movies, and delivered the only fully successful performance among Poor Things’ aggravatingly all-over-the-place ensemble. I’m excited to see more showcases for him, and hopefully this movie’s buzz will allow him a swift rebound from yet another “cinematic universe” bandwagon-hopper that recently fell flat on its face…
LOVE ME – In Theaters January 31
Directed by Sam and Andy Zuchero
Starring Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun
What is it about? A buoy and a satellite meet online and fall in love after the end of human civilization.
How am I feelin’ about this one? In theory, I should be hella excited for this movie. It’s a low-budget-but-conceptually-ambitious science fiction indie drama clocking in at just over ninety minutes. It stars two amazing screen performers I’m always looking forward to seeing more of (and good lord, Kristen Stewart looks gorgeous in the trailer). It’s unabashedly romantic. And it looks like there’s a dog! I’m all for those things!
But also, going back to that trailer, the movie kinda seems… insufferable. The CGI renditions of the buoy and satellites look like they were from a decade-old Pixar movie, the low-fi renditions of the “humanized” versions of them look like a preview of The Metaverse, and the live-action portions look pretty chintzy as well. Also, I can’t stand listening to dialogue about how life, man, is just like, whoa. If you’re still not sure what I’m describing with that complaint, go watch the trailer, and mentally imagine every line Stewart and Yeun say in it ending with “maaaaaan.” You’re picking up on it now, right? It doesn’t help that Sam and Andy Zuchero, making their feature directorial debut, are professionally referring themselves as “Zucheros,” which seems a little too desperate to ape Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s “Daniels” duo nickname.
But I shouldn’t judge something based on its lame trailer. A lot of people seemed to really love this movie, including Stewart herself, who was so fond of the script that she was nervous about taking the role and not doing it justice. It won the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize at last year’s Sundance Film Festival. Clearly, there is something audiences are finding profound about this movie in its full context, separate from its advertising.
BRIDGET JONES: MAD ABOUT THE BOY – On Peacock February 13, In Theaters February 14
Directed by Michael Morris
Starring Renée Zellweger, with Chiwetel Ejiofor and Leo Woodall
What is it about? Bridget Jones navigates life as a widow and single mom while being romantically pursued by a younger man and maybe – just maybe – her son’s science teacher.
How am I feelin’ about this one? The modern entertainment industry is so baffling to me. On the one hand, they are about as antiquated and culturally reactionary as they’ve ever been, telling the same stories with the same characters to appeal to the same audiences they first reached decades ago and are now well into middle age or older. The most popular IPs they maintain are usually reinforcing thematic messages about preserving some kind of status quo. They’ve got 62-year-old Tom Cruise still hanging off of airplanes and J. K. Rowling continuing to pump out prequels and spinoffs to her moribund “Wizarding World” franchise (when she’s not freakishly obsessing over other people’s genitals on X, of course). We are an aging population run by geriatric elites, so it sort of makes sense that this is the state of entertainment these days.
And yet, despite a pop culture landscape more amenable to the desires and anxieties of old people than ever before, it seems like no one running the entertainment industry is capable of depicting the experience of growing old beyond a tiny spectrum of registers. Think about how many popular franchises have introduced their elderly protagonists as sad sack shells of their former selves in recent years. If pop culture consumers are collectively getting older, why do pop storytellers seem so hellbent on telling them that getting older is miserable unless they find some sort of unexpected “youthful” pathway to their glory years?
Which brings us to Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, the fourth installment of the Bridget Jones series and an adaptation of the novel that Helen Fielding has heavily implied will be her final outing with the character. When we last left everyone’s favorite adorable-but-perpetually-insecure Bridget Jones, she had married the love of her life, Mark Darcy, after having deduced that he is in fact the father of baby William. So now we return to Mark… dead. He died. Bridget Jones is mourning him as a widower. And I’m all for positive depictions of single mothers in fiction and all, but is it really that hard to sell a romance between two people who have been married a long time? Must we see Bridget enjoy the thrill of a love triangle as a single woman yet again? Learning about this premise reminded me of Clerks III, which I hated for so many reasons, one of them being the decision to have Dante’s fiancée and unborn child die off-screen sometime after the end of Clerks II, putting Dante right back to being a single dude at a convenience store just like in the first movie before he goes off to, effectively, film Clerks with his foul-mouthed buddy Randall in more or less the same way it was filmed back in 1994 despite that making no sense in 2022. Kevin Smith has been married to the same woman for over twenty-five years and is a father to a now-adult daughter; could he seriously not think of a narratively compelling way to depict the longest-running protagonist of his “View Askewniverse” dealing with the challenges of matrimony and fatherhood? He had to kill them both off from the jump?
Based on Hollywood’s output, I guess it’s just not a thing most modern storytellers are interested in. And that sucks. No wonder so many Americans are in a state of arrested development.
CAPTAIN AMERICA: NEW WORLD ORDER BRAVE NEW WORLD – In Theaters February 14
Directed by Julius Onah
Starring Anthony Mackie, with Harrison Ford and Shira Haas
What is it about? Sam Wilson, the new Captain America, finds himself in the middle of an international incident and must discover the motive behind a nefarious global plan.
How am I feelin’ about this one? Man, would I have loved to have been a fly on the wall listening to the Disney board meeting where some poor junior executive had to explain to Kevin Feige and Bob Iger why titling the next Captain America solo movie (and the first theatrical feature to star Sam Wilson as Steve Rogers’ successor) “New World Order” was a bad idea and why they had to retitle it to something else. Granted, “Brave New World” probably won’t be that much better at tamping down the derangement of conspiracy cranks like Alex Jones, since those idiots love to cite books they’ve never read and find connections to them everywhere. But still, good call on the part of Disney to make that swap.
As for the movie itself, setting aside my antipathy towards the Marvel Cinematic Universe and my continuing belief that it is on its way out the door of cultural prominence despite the success of Deadpool & Wolverine, I do think there’s something intriguing about Captain America: Brave New World trying to go for the same Alan J. Pakula-esque conspiracy thriller angle that vaulted Captain America: The Winter Soldier into the upper tier of the entire MCU (only the first Iron Man, Black Panther, and maybe Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3 top it as the best overall in the franchise in my eyes, and even then, their action sequences are all thoroughly outclassed by The Winter Soldier). Even better is that these “enemies from all sides!” challenge is now being presented to a character who, in theory, isn’t super-powered like Steve Rogers was. Then again, neither was Natasha Romanov and she easily survived at least a dozen injuries that would have been fatal for a normal human being in Black Widow.
Where I go right back to This Just Isn’t For Me territory is the Big Reveal in the trailer that President Thaddeus Ross (played by Harrison “Just Make Sure The Check Clears And I’m Done By 5:00 PM” Ford) is going to transform into Red Hulk in this film and… am I supposed to… care about that? Other than the motion capture of Ford being “hulked out” looking cool visually, what exactly is the narrative resonance of this development? The moment the credits rolled on Avengers: Endgame, every single subsequent MCU movie has just been Stuff Happening (in a franchise that never exactly excelled at tight plotting), and I have a hard time seeing this one as breaking that trend even when I’m reminded of the high points of The Winter Soldier.
THE MONKEY – In Theaters February 14
Directed by Osgood Perkins
Starring Theo James, with Tatiana Maslany and Elijah Wood
What is it about? After stumbling upon their father’s vintage toy monkey in the attic, twin brothers witness a string of horrifying deaths unfolding around them.
How am I feelin’ about this one? Wow, we didn’t have to wait long to see how Osgood Perkins would follow up his sleeper horror hit Longlegs, huh? Principal photography for this project started and ended only a few months before his satanic serial killer thriller became the highest-grossing independent film of last year. Which means The Monkey was greenlit and produced before the son of the legendary Norman Bates actor became the toast of the horror world and will, almost certainly, be able to negotiate more money and creative control on his next project. This is going to be interesting; we’re going to see the next horror feature from a horror filmmaker who just hit it big without any of the baggage a director who just hit it big carries with them into a follow-up.
Granted, I wasn’t as big a fan of that movie as Joey very much was, but this still looks really intriguing to me because of how different it seems from Longlegs. The trailer for The Monkey almost seems… silly, especially relative to the oppressive gloominess of Neon’s record-setting hit potentially setting themselves up to be a horror powerhouse. Which is not a negative criticism! Anyone who has read my columns for a while knows I love horror movies with a touch of unhinged silliness. And hey, one of the producers of The Monkey is James Wan, director of a horror movie with a level of gleeful derangement that literally made me weep tears of joy watching it.
Unfortunately, in a mirror-reversal situation with Wolf Man, the leading man here is someone I find profoundly uninteresting as a screen presence. Theo James is a blandly handsome Ken doll (not even a hilarious Ken) whose most notable roles are Older Boy Who Tells The Mary Sue Protagonist That He Sees Her For How Special She Is On The Inside in the aborted Divergent series and joining the cast of the Underworld franchise past the point anyone actually cared about it. Maybe he’ll come into his own and surprise me here.
MICKEY 17 – In Theaters March 7
Directed by Bong Joon-ho
Starring Robert Pattinson, with Naomi Ackie and Toni Collette
What is it about? Mickey 17, known as an “expendable,” goes on a dangerous journey to colonize an ice planet.
How am I feelin’ about this one? Hey wait a minute, didn’t I already preview this movie? Oh, right, and then it got delayed. And then it got delayed again. And now it’s settled on the release date of March 7th.
Well… at least now we have a better idea of what we’re getting into with Bong Joon-ho’s loooong-awaited follow up to his history-making Oscar hit Parasite. Rather than the opaque, atmospheric science fiction drama hinted in its first teaser, Bong is hitting us with his usual brand of oddball energy, shocking violence, and dark humor that has been pretty much a staple of all of his movies. I have to admit, I have not been all that jazzed about his previous English-language efforts. I don’t know if it’s a language or cultural barrier, but whatever about his idiosyncrasies that worked so well with The Host, Mother, and of course Parasite just didn’t translate all that well to Snowpiercer or Okja in my eyes.
That’s not to say third time won’t be the charm for Bong, however. Indeed, Mickey 17 looks mighty impressive, with easily the best visual effects of any of his movies. It also stars a game Robert Pattinson tackling a dual role that looks to flex his comedic chops. It also looks to feature Mark Ruffalo reprising his nails-on-a-chalkboard performance in Poor Things, which… ugh, let’s just focus on the positives for now…
I am, of course, seeing this as the most intriguing and exciting upcoming feature of the early months of the year. A (relatively) big-budget sci-fi epic that downright assures us we’re about to see something proudly bizarre? I’ll never say no to that.
So what movie this year do you think will make you say “WTF?” Which result at the upcoming Academy Awards do you think will make us all say “WTF?” Will we even survive to the end of this year? Let us know in the comments.
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