If you had told us at the beginning of 2013 that a movie starring Sandra Bullock against a green screen would be the best movie of the year, or that an animated movie starring Nicolas Cage as a caveman would be one of the highest grossing films, or that a pro-America Roland Emmerich megablockbuster would tank harder than you had ever thought possible, we’d have been a little surprised. This year, we’re going to stay ahead of the game and make some thoughtful, and perhaps even crazy movie predictions of our own. At the end of the year, we’ll see how accurate our movie predictions turned out to be, but for now, let’s just assume that we’re geniuses and have the whole industry and wide world of audience members pegged with our prognostications about Star Wars, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, X-Men: Days of Future Past, the Oscars and a whole lot more.
We cannot predict the future, but we can wildly speculate, and that’s half of what the internet is all about. (The other half? Mostly porn.) Here are CraveOnline’s 14 Movie Predictions for 2014.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
14 Movie Predictions for 2014
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There Will Be No Star Wars News
Oh sure, we'll get an update here and there, maybe a little casting, maybe even a title (but we doubt it, at least until 2015), but we predict that J.J. Abrams will do his usual thing and reveal nothing of consequence about Star Wars: Episode VII until the last possible minute. Since the film doesn't come out until late 2015, that means little or no news in 2014.
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The Teen Fantasy Genre Will Be Declared 'Dead'
After multiple box office bombs in 2013 (Beautiful Creatures, The Mortal Instruments, The Host), and a slew of unimpressive-looking entries in 2014 (Vampire Academy, The Maze Runner, Divergent), we predict that teen fantasy movies will finally, for better or worse, be declared a lost cause, unless of course the words "Potter," "Twilight" or "Hunger" are in the title.
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Robocop Will Flop Hard
Is ANYONE looking forward to this movie? The remake of Paul Verhoeven's 1987 sci-fi classic hasn't been able to put together a single decent trailer so far, and it's coming out in less than two months. It might eventually make its money back, but interest is low, and from what we've seen so far, it just looks awful.
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The Golden Globes Will Be Meaningless
Duh. That's why we don't cover them at CraveOnline. They're the product of a nebulously qualified voting body that in no way reflects actual artists or audiences, and only exists as an excuse to get celebrities drunk and then shove them onstage.
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The Oscars Will Also Be Meaningless
We actually LIKE the Oscars, at least as a Super Bowl-style event for movie-lovers, but by the time the awards are actually handed out on March 2, the winners will mostly be foregone conclusions, any surprises will be of momentary interest at best, and the actual "best film of the year" probably won't even have been nominated. The time has come to admit that the Oscars an amusing distraction to the world at large, at most, and need to take up a lot less space in our hearts, minds and publications.
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Veronica Mars Won't Be a Hit
The victory has already been won: after years of interest from hardcore fans and an enormously successful Kickstarter campaign, the cult TV series "Veronica Mars" is finally getting a follow-up movie in March. But we suspect that practically everyone who really wants to see Veronica Mars: The Movie has already been catalogued by Kickstarter, and that the movie won't break out and attract much interest from potential new fans. And it sure as hell isn't going to make enough money to warrant a film franchise. We won a single movie out of this, Marshmallows, and the best we can hope for is that it turns out pretty good.
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Captain America: The Winter Soldier Will Ruin 'Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.'
ABC's perhaps likable but undeniably trifling TV series set within the confines of S.H.I.E.L.D. is getting serious competition - from Marvel Studios itself - in the form of Captain America: The Winter Soldier on April 4. Can the episodic, lower-budgeted TV series hold up to a large-scale, larger-budgeted movie set within the same organization? We highly, highly doubt it.
And speaking of The Winter Soldier...
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Robert Redford Has a Secret in Captain America 2
We don't have the inside scoop on this, but it stands to reason. How the hell did they get Robert Redford to appear in Captain America: The Winter Soldier? Probably by making his small part a very, very big deal. Yes, he's probably the bad guy, but look at his iconic career for a moment and consider this possibility: if they cloned Captain America decades ago, and he aged normally, wouldn't he look EXACTLY like this...?
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X-Men: Days of Future Past Will Change the Game
Fox has finally realized that they own a significant portion of the Marvel Universe, and they're starting to put together a proper cinematic continuity of their own, beginning - it stands to reason - with X-Men: Days of Future Past, a time-travelling, world-building sequel with the potential for a big cliffhanger alternate-dimension spawning finale that could set the stage for X-Force and, since they own this too, Fantastic Four. We predict that this will be Fox's call to arms, and if good enough, it might be heard across the entire industry.
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Critics Will Hate/Audiences Will Love Transformers: Age of Extinction
Yes, yes, Transformers: Age of Extinction will have Dinobots. That's kind of cool. It is also, sadly, still Michael Bay's overblown Transformers franchise, the very series that opens gaping rifts between critics who acknowledge just how stupid giant transforming robots really are, and audiences who just think they're kinda neat. The ongoing argument will continue this summer.
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Brett Ratner's Hercules Will 'Win,' But Still Suck
There are two Hercules movies this year - Renny Harlin's The Legend of Hercules (Jan. 10) and Brett Ratner's Hercules (Jul. 25) - but there's just no competition. With a higher profile star (Dwayne Johnson), a bigger release date and a significantly larger VFX and marketing budget, Brett Ratner's version seems poised to capture more attention and make much more money. But it's still a Brett Ratner movie, so it's still probably going to suck really, really hard. (Not that The Legend of Hercules looks any better...)
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Everyone is Going to Love Rocket Raccoon
He's little, he's furry, he's a total badass. If they pull off Guardians of the Galaxy as well as we hope they will, there's a good chance that Rocket Raccoon will be the breakout character of the year, a completely unexpected creation that shows just how intriguing, strange and effective even the quirkiest corners of the Marvel Universe can be when translated to the big screen.
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Jupiter Ascending Will Destroy Careers
Just to be clear: we don't WANT Jupiter Ascending to be a bad movie, or an unsuccessful movie, or even for any of the talent involved to get in trouble for making it. But we DO know that Wachowski Starship hasn't made a hit movie in over a decade, that Mila Kunis has never carried a blockbuster before, and that the last time Channing Tatum carried a blockbuster it was the (underrated) box office failure White House Down. So if Jupiter Ascending isn't a big smash, the careers a lot of talented people could be damaged for years.
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Batman vs. Superman Will Change Its Name to 'Justice League'
Everything we're afraid of for Batman vs. Superman - too many heroes, possibly too many villains, not enough screen time for Wonder Woman since her name isn't in the title - would suddenly seem a lot less scary if Warner Bros. would just give up and call it Justice League already. We're not saying that it's going to happen, making this kind of a crappy prediction, but if it did, the studio would engender a lot of good will and make audiences more excited than ever.
