You’re Going to Thank Us for This 2017 Summer Movie Guide

Baywatch

Release: May 26th

The plot of this one doesn’t sound very deep, but, c’mon, it’s based on Baywatch. That means babes, beaches and more babes. Plus Dwayne Johnson and Zac Efron. Dwayne is Mitch Buchannon, head of an elite lifeguard squad (who knew there was such a thing?) and Zac is Matt Brody, new face of the team. Needless to say they bump heads, but must work together when a dead body washes up from the ocean that’s connected to a drug trafficking operation. Expect plenty of slo-mo shots on the beach in this one.

Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales

Release: May 26th

Has Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow overstayed his welcome with film audiences? That will be the question when this fifth installment in the series arrives some six years after On Stranger Tides. This time out Jack’s sounding positively Indiana Jones-like as he pursues the Trident Of Poseidon, an instrument that grants its users power over all the seas. He’ll need it, because an old rival named Armando Salazar (Javier Bardem) and his ghost crew have broken free from the “Devil’s Triangle,” and is seeking to kill every pirate on the seas. The first three installments in the series were The Curse Of The Black Pearl (2003), Dead Man’s Chest (2006) and At World’s End (2007).

Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie

Release: June 2nd

Based on the children’s book series of the same name, this CG animated film looks at elementary students George Beard and Harold Hutchins, who, tired of Principal Krupp’s grumpy attitude, hypnotize him into believing that he is the superhero Captain Underpants. But then (who would have thunk it?) a villain rises in the form of Professor Poopypants. Can Captain Underpants become an actual superhero? What do you think…?

Wonder Woman

Release: June 2nd

Introduced last year in Batman V. Superman: Dawn Of Justice, Gal Gadot reprises the role of Wonder Woman in what is an origin story. When American pilot Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) crashes on the island of the Amazons, Themyscira, Diana elects to save the world of man during World War I, discovering her full powers and destiny along the way. As reported by FHM, director Patty Jenkins says, “I feel like there are a lot of superheroes who are chosen and find themselves in these positions and want to stop crime or save people or things. She's one of the very few who believes in goodness and kindness and justice and love; who comes to our world hoping to instill that in other people, but is willing to use force if that's what she must do to keep mankind safe.”

It Comes At Night

Release: June 9th

There is something going on in the world. Something terrible. But one family seems to have protected itself from whatever that “thing” might be. This husband, wife and son are living a relatively calm life until another family, desperate for help, arrives, is taken in and it isn’t long before paranoia and mistrust takes root. Don’t it always? The film’s distributor, A24, suggests, “Imagine the end of the world. Now imagine something worse. It Comes At Night follows a man (Joel Edgerton) as he learns that the evil stalking his family home may be only a prelude to horrors that come from within.”

The Book Of Henry

Release: June 16th

So between directing Jurassic World and Star Wars Episode IX, Colin Trevorrow has decided to take on a decidedly smaller though no less imaginative story: a single mother and her son decide to help bring her other’s son’s written musings of protecting a young next door neighbor from her abusive stepfather to life. It's a lot darker than it sounds. May justice be served!

Cars 3

Release: June 16th

Putting all of that spy business from Cars 2 behind him, Lightning McQueen is trying to keep his career going by turning to race technician Cruz Ramierez so that he can take on high tech racer Jackson Storm. You can do it, Lightning! This is Pixar—you can do anything!

Rough Night

Release: June 16th

Five college best friends reunite in Miami for a bachelorette party 10 years after graduating. But their partying gets out of control, resulting in the death of a male stripper, and what follows is their coming together to try and cover it up. So it’s a story about… enduring friendship?

47 Meters Down

Release: June 23rd

Two sisters, played by Mandy Moore and Claire Holt, decide for different reasons to get a little adventure in their lives. The solution? Going shark diving in Mexico and feeling pretty empowered from the protection their cage provides them. But then—prepare yourselves—the cable snaps, sending the ladies and the observation cage to the sea bed, which is forty-seven meters down. Obviously this is not going to be Jaws, but can it equal last year’s The Shallows?

The Bad Batch

Release: June 23rd
“Making a film is like putting on a perfume—you see who it attracts,” writer director Ana Lily Amirpour has stated. Which sounds like an interesting experiment, the results of which should prove intriguing considering that this film could give a whole new meaning to the phrase “Hunger Games.” The setting is a dystopian future, and the wasteland that was once Texas. Apparently this is a love story told against the backdrop of a community of cannibals.

The Beguiled

Release: June 23rd

During the Civil War a wounded union soldier is brought to a Virginia all girls school, where the students have been kept sheltered from the outside world. His arrival turns everything upside down, filling the school with sexual tension that, in turn results in a fierce competitions between the young ladies that goes down a dark path.

Transformers: The Last Knight

Release: June 23rd

C’mon, everybody sing: “Transformers… money in disguise.” Truthfully, this is another one of those franchises that nobody could have imagined gong the distance or pulling in the billions that it has, deflecting criticism the way that Superman does bullets. Picking up where the last film, Age Of Extinction, left off, it deals with the ultimate battle for survival between humans and Transformers. The key, believes inventor Cade Yeager (played by Mark Wahlberg), is to discern why the Transformers continue to come to Earth. To do so, he teams with Bumblebee, an Oxford professor and an English lord. There are plans for a Bumblee spin-off for 2018, a sixth Transformers film in 2019 and rumblings of a crossover between Transformers and G.I. Joe.

Baby Driver

Release: June 28th

Wikipedia sums this one up nicely: “A young and talented getaway driver named Baby (Ansel Elgort) relies on the personal beat of his preferred soundtrack to be the best in the world of crime. When he meets the girl of his dreams (Lily James), Baby sees a chance to ditch his criminal life and make a clean getaway. But after being coerced into working for a mysterious criminal (Kevin Spacey), he must face the music when an ill-fated heist threatens his life, love and chance of freedom.” Is it us, or did they fill that description with a number of puns? Hey, that’s our job!

Amityville: The Awakening

Release: June 30th

Yet another family (the 19th) moves into that damn Amityville house, and wouldn’t you know—stuff starts to happen almost immediately. In this case a single mother moves in with her daughters Belle and Juliet and son James, the latter of whom is comatose. But then he wakes up, which is good news, right? Sure, until Belle starts suffering from intensifying nightmares. Does anyone do a title search before they buy this place?

Despicable Me 3

Release: June 30th

We don’t mind admitting that we’re a little nervous over this one. Oh, yeah, sure, it looks like a lot of fun, and it’ll be great to have Steve Carrell back voicing Gru… buuuuuuut, where the hell are the Minions? Yes they’re in the trailer, but the manner in which they’re featured concerns us that their part is going to be Minionmal at best. At least they’re trying to fill this apparent gap by having Gru reunited with his twin brother, Dru, who wants him to participate in a diamond heist.

The House

Release: June 30th

When they lose their daughter’s college fund, Scottt and Kate Johansen (Will Ferrell and Amy Poehler) decide they’ve got to take matters into their hands to replace that money. To do so, they team up with their neighbors and launch an illegal casino in their basement. Yeah, that sounds like it’s going to work.

Spider-Man: Homecoming

Release: July 7th

Tom Holland made his debut as Spidey in last-year’s Captain America: Civil War, and here he is having an adventure of his own (unless you count Downey appearing as mentor Tony Stark/Iron Man). The villain is Keaton’s the Vulture, who seems far deadlier than the old guy with feathers originally introduced in the comics all those years ago. Director Jon Watts, as previously noted by FHM, views this as a “straight-up high school movie.” He says, “It’s about a fifteen year old kid. I always describe it that this is the ground level of the Marvel Universe. We know what it’s like to be a billionaire playboy inventor, and we know what it’s like to be an alien god from another dimension, we learned what it was like to go into the astral plane, and we’re also going to see what it’s like to have just finished going through puberty and being in tenth grade.”

War For The Planet Of the Apes

Release: July 14th

As this rebooted franchise continues (and moving forward from the last film, Dawn Of The Planet of the Apes), apes and humans are already at war, and it’s a savage battle. Caesar (Andy Serkis) is attempting to keep his “people” safe, but doing so may require him regressing to a darkness of the soul that seems to drive his opponent, the Colonel (Woody Harrelson). Notes Serkis, “In Dawn, we took Caesar to what I thought was the brink; having to kill his own kind was a step that we almost fought about. But I’m so glad that we went there, because it loaded what was then going to be the beginning of the journey in the third film. It pitches him into two years later where we pick him up, as the ape losses get worse and worse. Because he was brought up with human beings, he has no hate towards humans. But this is a journey into falling into a lack of empathy and a source of hatred that surprises himself. He tears himself apart with it throughout the course of the journey, but he can't stop himself and is drawn towards finding revenge.”

Wish Upon

Release: July 14th

“The Monkey’s Paw” may have been written in 1902, but it should be required reading for anyone who comes across a magical item and starts making wishes upon it. Those things never go right, and the tradition holds true here when a high school student comes across a music box that will grant seven wishes and make her dreams come true. But as soon as she starts, people close to her begin to die. Uh, maybe stop making wishes?

Dunkirk

Release: July 21st

Set during the early stages of World War II, allied soldiers from Britain, Belgium, Canada and France find themselves surrounded by the German army on the beaches of Dunkirk, awaiting evacuation between May 26 and June 4 1940. Sadly as much as we’d like, we can’t work any snark into this particular description. It’s the newest film from Christopher Nolan, and, hey, his Dark Knight Rises wasn’t that good (whew!).

Girls Trip

Release: July 21st

As Universal describes it, “When four lifelong friends travel to New Orleans for the annual Essence Festival, sisterhoods are rekindled, wild sides are rediscovered, and there's enough dancing, drinking, brawling, and romancing to make the Big Easy blush.” And that’s saying a lot.

Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets

Release: July 21st

Based on the French science fiction comic Valerian And Laureline, this film takes place in the 28th Century and focuses on a pair of special operatives sent out from the Minister Of Defense to Alpha, an ever-expanding metropolis where, as Wikipedia puts it, “species from across the universe have converged over centuries to share knowledge, intelligence, and culture. At the center of Alpha is a mysterious dark force which threatens the peaceful existence of the City of a Thousand Planets, and Valerian and Laureline must race to identify the menace and safeguard not just Alpha, but the future of the universe.” As revealed in trailers, the look of the film is wonderful, and Luc Besson’s passion could turn this one into a hit, as the comic was one of his primary creative influences growing up. In describing that impact, Besson recalls, “I’ve read the comic books since I was 10-years-old. At the time, it was two pages every Wednesday in a magazine. You basically had to wait six months to read the entire story. In France at the time, there were two TV channels, one in black and white, one in color, and the only way to escape were these comics. Probably the first woman I fell in love with was Laureline when I was 10. And this kind of comic book built myself. I was living in the countryside, I would open my window and see cows. I wanted to escape, and every Wednesday, it was Valerian and Laureline.”

Atomic Blonde

Release: July 28th

If you’re going to take a one-two punch to the face, it might as well be from Charlize Theron. First, she threw the Fast And Furious universe into chaos in Fast 8, and then she’s kicking butt in the punk rock spy thriller Atomic Blonde. Inspired by the graphic novel The Coldest City, the film’s setting is Berlin in 1989 on the eve of the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The expected shift in alliances between the world’s various superpowers is in danger from a spy ring intent on triggering World War III. Enter Theron’s British agent Lorraine Broughton, who teams up with James McAvoy’s David Percival, Berlin station chief. Together, they attempt to keep things on track.

The Dark Tower

Release: August 4th

Eleven-year-old Jake Chambers (Tom Taylor) follows a number of clues that leads him to another dimension known as Mid-World. There he meets “frontiersman knight” Roland Deschain (Idris Elba), and joins him on the quest to find End-World’s “Dark Tower,” which he believes will save his home from destruction. All along the way they encounter a variety of creatures as well as sorcerer Walter Padick (Matthew McConaughey). Producer Ron Howard explained the choice of Idris Elba as Deschain to Deadline: “Idris brings this crucial combination of coiled danger, quiet charisma, undercurrents of complexity and nobility, and a kind of timeless cool. These are the elemental qualities of Roland, in my mind, and I think Idris carries it incredibly well.” Based on the novels by Stephen King.

Detroit

Release: August 4th

Centered around Detroit Michigan’s 1967 “Algiers Motel Incident”, a police raid that resulted in the deaths of three black men, and the savage beatings of seven other black men and a pair of white women. Not so much a feel-good movie.

Ingrid Goes West

Release: August 4th

Taylor Sloane is a social media “influencer” who seems to have built herself a pretty perfect life in Los Angeles. She’s an inspiration to her numerous followers, including, unfortunately, Pennsylvania resident Ingrid Thorburn, who’s a wee bit unstable mentally. Driving home this point, she decides to leave her current life behind to relocate to L.A. to become Sloane’s real-life friend. Do things go dark from there? This ain’t no Disney movie.

Wind River

Release: August 4th

Cory Lambert, an agent for the US Fish And Wildlife Service, comes across a dead body in the wilderness of the Wind River Indian Reservation. Shortly thereafter, he finds himself partnered with rookie FBI agent Jane Banner, who has no idea what she’s in for in terms of surviving in the elements and needs Lambert’s tracking skills. Together they find themselves plunged into a deepening world of violence. Hey, if you ever wondered what The Avengers do when they’re not saving the world, maybe this is it: Lambert is played by Jeremy Renner (Hawkeye) and Banner by Elizabeth Olsen (Scarlet Witch).

Annabelle: Creation

Release: August 11th

Set in the ever-growing Conjuring universe, this is a prequel to 2014’s Annabelle looking at a dollmaker and his wife, who, having lost their daughter two decades earlier, have created a doll in her image. Being kindly sorts, they open up their home to a nun and several girls from a recently-closed orphanage, but—wouldn't you know it?—that doll happens to be of the possessed variety, and begins to torment one of the girls in particular (with lots of collateral damage, of course). What asked about the fascination with killer dolls, director David F. Sandberg muses, “I think the creepiness of dolls is probably an uncanny value factor. We’ve created these things to look like us, but we get creeped out because, you know, is it a person? Is there something in there? I don’t know. There’s just something about a doll and if it would move, it would just freak you out.” That’s why Toy Story was so unnerving!

The Hitman’s Bodyguard

Release: August 18th

Check out this one: Ryan Reynolds is playing a bodyguard who is hired by a former enemy who happens to be a hit man (and played by Samuel L. Jackson), and the two of them need to put their differences aside—and there are a lot of them—so that they can take down a foreign dictator played by Gary Oldman. Uh, when do tickets go on sale?

Logan Lucky

Release: August 18th

When your family seems to have been struck by bad luck, what do you try to turn things around? For siblings Jimmy, Mellie and Clyde Logan the answer lies in the Memorial Day weekend Coca-Cola 600 race at Charlotte Motor Speedway in Concord, North Carolina. There they plan what will undoubtedly be the imperfect heist.

Animal Crackers

Release: September 1st

It sounds like the set-up for a superhero movie, but it’s not. In this CG animated film, the Huntington family inherits a rundown circus. Among its possessions is a unique box of animal crackers. When someone eats one of those crackers, they find themselves transformed into what animal that cracker represents. We’re really going out on a limb here, but we think those will be the animals that save this circus from the Huntington’s evil uncle, Horatio.