Hollywood loves a good apocalypse. And, to be fair, so do we.
We’re currently living through a chapter of a future history book, in a proper “Life as we knew it changed forever” event, and during this time, what we’ve needed are happy distractions.
If you’re thinking the last thing we all need is a big screen version of the impending apocalypse, TOO BAD!
There is nothing Hollywood loves to do more than end the world, and to be fair, there are very few things we love to see on the big screen more than the entire planet cosplaying as a dumpster fire.
So, to that end, here are five upcoming movies that are sure to scratch that particular, apocalyptic itch.
THE TOMORROW WAR
Let us start off nice and easy, shall we? Nothing too stressful. The director of The Lego Batman Movie is going big budget with his next movie, and it features Chris Pratt playing a character called Barney Gamble (yes, really), who is drafted by an army in the future to help fight a losing war against an alien invasion.
Originally due to be released in cinemas on Christmas Day 2020 (but, y’know, Covid), it has since been pushed back to 23 July, but it also looks like Amazon Studios will buy it, so it could end up premiering on streaming services this summer.
BIOS
Directed by Miguel Sapochnik (he directed The Battle of the Bastards episode of GoT), co-written by the folk behind Blade Runner and Alien, this sounds a little bit like a live-action version of Wall-E.
It stars Tom Hanks as the last man on Earth, who creates a robot to keep him and his dog company as they set off on a journey across the ruined country. It is currently set for release on 16 April this year, but we’ll see how that pans out…
MOONFALL
When Roland Emmerich – the director of Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, and 2012 – announces he’s making another movie about a potential apocalypse, you kind of have to sit up and pay attention.
He’s amassed quite an impressive cast – Halle Berry, Patrick Wilson, John Bradley (Samwell Tarly from GoT!), Donald Sutherland, and Michael Pena – and it involves… well, you can probably guess from the title.
An asteroid hits the Moon, and the Moon starts to fall towards Earth. Cue mass hysteria. The movie is currently in production, so we’d guess you’ll be seeing it on the big screens in Summer 2022.
UNTITLED CONTAGION SEQUEL
The frighteningly accurate thriller that proved to be almost too scarily real for people to enjoy through the real world pandemic – if you’d like, it is currently available to watch on Netflix and Prime Video – is in the process of getting a sequel.
In December, director Steven Soderbergh told Happy Sad Podcast the following: “I’ve got a project in development that [screenwriter] Scott Burns is working with me on, that’s a kind of philosophical sequel to Contagion, but in a different context. You’ll kind of look at the two of them as kind of paired, but very different hair colours. So, Scott and I had been talking about, ‘So, what’s the next iteration of a Contagion-type story?’ We have been working on that; we should probably hot-foot it a little bit.”
It is obviously still very early in development, so we might not see this before 2023. We might have calmed down enough from the current pandemic to feel okay enough to watch a film about a new one.
DON’T LOOK UP
Leonardo DiCaprio. Jennifer Lawrence. Cate Blanchett. Meryl Streep. Jonah Hill. Timothee Chalamet. Ariana Grande. Chris Evans. Matthew Perry. We could go on listing this movie’s impressive cast, but we’d be here for a while. The latest movie from Adam McKay (The Big Short, Anchorman, Vice), tells the story of two low-level astronomers (DiCaprio and Lawrence) who go on a worldwide media campaign to warn of an impending asteroid collision.
Are we ready for a comedy about the potential of the world as we know it? We’ll know when it is released on Netflix later in 2021.
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