Honorable Mention
OK, let’s talk about why you are upset or whatever because something is missing. Sure, some key mainstream films are not on the main list, but again, some of them are right here! “Fast X,” “Shazam! Fury of the Gods,” “Cocaine Bear,” “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts,” “Blue Beetle,” “Scream 6,” “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves,” “Beverly Hills Cop: Axel Foley,” “Evil Dead Rise,” “The Little Mermaid” and hell, we hope they’re great, as we hope every film in the world is, but that’s not always the reality is it.
Other studio films you could get excited about: “Tetris” with Taron Egerton. “House Party,” the “Searching” sequel, “Missing,” Josh Gordon & Will Speck‘s “Distant,” Adam Sandler‘s “Murder Mystery 2,” the animated “Strays” with Will Ferrell, Columbia’s “Harold and the Purple Crayon” animated film, the Patrick Wilson-directed “Insidious: Fear the Dark,” Disney’s “Haunted Mansion” with Rosario Dawson, Tiffany Haddish, Lakeith Stanfield, Owen Wilson, Denzel Washington‘s “The Equalizer 3,” “The Expendables 4,” Sony’s “Kraven The Hunter” from director J.C. Chandor (actually, we’re hoping this is great and he rules), “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes,” and the “Untitled Ghostbusters Afterlife sequel” that’s scheduled for December (newsflash, this will likely be bumped to 2024, hasn’t even finished casting and they just announced a change of directors).
Additionally, the 2023 Sundance Film Festival line-up announces tomorrow so we purposefully made some room for some of those titles to stand out on a separate anticipation list coming in less than 24 hours, got it? (Here’s that full Sundance 2023 line-up with a lot of films from this list).
There are always a lot of titles that recur on this list but take years to come out. One we took off the proper list that represents a lot of these types of in-limbo films is “The Brutalist” from challenging and provocative filmmaker Brady Corbet (“Vox Lux”). His film has an epic cast, Vanessa Kirby, Marion Cotillard, Sebastian Stan, Joel Edgerton, and Mark Rylance, but it got delayed during COVID, never shot and we’re not sure what’s happening with it (and given James Gray‘s “Armageddon Time,” which also had COVID delays and lost its original cast of Oscar Isaac, Robert DeNiro, Cate Blanchett and more, this one could be headed for a total repackaging).
Also, keep in mind, like every year, we do the Best Films Of 2023 That We’ve Already Seen feature (here’s last year’s version), and that’s films from the 2022 fall film festival circuit that we reviewed but aren’t coming out until 2023, like Kelly Reichardt‘s “Showing Up“ for A24 with Michelle Williams, Jesse Eisenberg‘s directorial debut, “When You Finish Saving The World” with Julianne Moore, “Godland,” and Adil El Arbi & Bilall‘s “Rebel,“ films like that.
