Your Holiday Movie Season Sneak-Peek
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- We interrupt the current summer movie season to bring you a sneak peek at the lineup of movies headed our way at year's end...
Following the warm-weather parade of Hollywood tentpoles –- big-budget, high-profile, high-energy spectacles, many of them sequels or remakes or updates or spinoffs, and more than a few emerging from the world of comic books -– and turning up just in time for Oscar season will be a lineup with the same variety of genres but in different proportions.
The opening dates are not yet etched in stone (not that they ever are), but here are, as of now in the general order of release, fifteen titles opening from before Thanksgiving until after Christmas that comprise a blueprint of stars and stories and directors and titles for the big 2014 holiday movie season.
For moviegoers resisting the charms of Hollywood's summer buffet and fans curious about Oscar contenders, this is the point at which you can start looking ahead, glancing past, and looking forward to.
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Matthew McCanaughey, Anne Hathaway, and Jessica Chastain star in director Christopher Nolan's science fiction mystery-thriller about explorers who find a wormhole that changes space travel in Interstellar (top phot0).
Steve Carell portrays John du Pont, Channing Tatum is Mark Schultz, and Mark Ruffalo plays David Schultz in a biographical murder drama based on the true story of an Olympic wrestler, his sponsor, and his brother in Foxcatcher.
Brad Pitt and Shia LaBeouf star in a World War II drama in which a five-man crew goes on a deadly and improbable mission behind enemy lines in Nazi Germany as the Allies make their final push in Fury.
Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels (below) reunite as Lloyd Christmas and Harry Dunne for a sequel to the 1994 hit as dimwits in search of a long-lost daughter and a new kidney in the buddy comedy, Dumb and Dumber To.
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Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen becomes the reluctant symbol of a mass rebellion against the autocratic Capitol in the third-installment science-fiction adventure sequel, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1.
Kevin Costner stars as the real-life coach of a Latino high school cross-country track team of unlikely California champions in the 1980s in McFarland.
Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley co-star in the biographical drama about British wartime mathematician Alan Turing, who helped crack the Nazis' Enigma code, in The Imitation Game.
Those popular background creatures come front and center for their own feature film in the 3-D computer-animated spinoff spy-thriller comedy, The Penguins of Madagascar.
Jason Bateman, Charlie Day, Jason Sudeikis, Jennifer Aniston, Kevin Spacey, and Jamie Foxx are back at it again with the launch of a new business in the sequel to the 2011 comedy hit in Horrible Bosses 2.
Reese Witherspoon, Joaquin Phoenix, and Owen Wilson co-star in a dark crime thriller based on the Thomas Pynchon novel involving the disappearance of two people in 1970s Los Angeles in Inherent Vice.
Ridley Scott directs Christian Bale as Moses leading the Israelite slaves out of Egypt in a biblical epic based on the Old Testament Book of Exodus in Exodus: Gods and Kings.
Director Peter Jackson returns to Middle Earth for a final installment in his adventure-fantasy trilogy based on the J.R.R. Tolkien novel, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies.
Ben Stiller is back in the night-watchman lead for a third time in the exhibits-come-to-life family-comedy sequel, Night at the Museum 3.
Quvenzhane Wallis, Jamie Foxx, and Cameron Diaz co-star in a contemporary-adaptation remake of the smash Broadway musical based on the Little Orphan Annie comic strip, Annie.
And Rob Marshall directs Johnny Depp, Meryl Streep, and Emily Blunt in the Tony Award-winning Stephen Sondheim musical set in the world of Grimm fairy tales, Into the Woods.
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Now that's a lineup, at least on paper (remember paper?), for movie buffs to eagerly anticipate.
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