Next Year's Blockbusters
It was just announced that the prequel "X-Men: First Class" will bring Marvel's mutants back to theaters. Thor and Captain America will get their own solo movies before joining "The Avengers." Johnny Depp returns as Captain Jack Sparrow in "Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides." A third "Transformers" movie is planned for the July 4th holiday. Animation can't avoid sequels either, with Pixar's "Cars" and DreamWorks' "Kung Fu Panda" getting second movies. And the last half of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" will mark the boy wizard's final big-screen adventure.
The Warner Bros./IMAX deal also includes other impressive movies that don't have release dates yet. They include "Gravity," a sci-fi drama with Robert Downey Jr., "Dark Shadows," with Johnny Depp as a vampire, "Fury Road," the revamp of the "Mad Max" series, and a new take on "Superman" that Christopher Nolan is also producing. But before any of that, Nolan's next film as a director, "Inception" with Leonardo DiCaprio, will unspool on IMAX and regular screens this July 16.
And if the Mayans were right about the world ending in December of 2012, let's hope it won't be until after the release of "The Hobbit." The prequel to "The Lord of the Rings" is set to roll out on IMAX screens that month. The apocalypse will be much easier to take if we get to see that movie first.
