With 2016 almost upon us, it's time for the studios to begin displaying their wares for the new year. With both big and small films to look forward to, the new year looks to be another promising one, but it's going to have to be something really special to top 2015. Entertainment Weekly (and Empire) have snagged the first looks at a lot of the new films that 2016 will have to offer, which you can check out below.
FINDING DORY (June 17, 2016)
The sequel to FINDING NEMO will see Dory (Ellen DeGeneres) setting out on a search to find her long-lost family. While visiting a marine-life facility she meets Bailey (Ty Burrell), a snubnosed beluga whale, and Destiny (Kaitlin Olson), a whale shark. The pair will play an important role in Dory's search and just like Dory, they have their own issues to overcome; Bailey isn't great with his own sonar capability and Destiny has trouble swimming straight. I smell a sitcom.
BOURNE 5 (June 29, 2015)
It's been many years since we last saw Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) on our screens, but the upcoming sequel will see the spy once again searching for answers from his past. Damon says that the film will find Bourne in a "dark and tortured place" and that the film will draw from many of the social and economical issues which have sprung up since the last time we saw Bourne, including "the financial collapse, the great recession, all these issues of cyberwarfare and civil liberties."
PATIENT ZERO (September 2, 2016)
Whatever you do, don't call them Zombies. Director Stefan Ruzowitzky says that "the great days of zombies are a little bit over. It’s time for something new.” PATIENT ZERO stars Matt Smith, Stanley Tucci, and Natalie Dormer as they battle against "intelligent, adrenaline-fueled creatures born from a viral superstrain." Ruzowitzky calls them "the infected" and says that they "have a lot of energy, they’re fast, they’re good-looking. Not those walking vegetables.”
KEANU (April 29, 2016)
Their Comedy Central show may have ended this year, but Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key are set to reunite in KEANU as two “blerds” (black nerds) who, in an attempt to rescue a stolen cat, impersonate gangsters and infiltrate a drug cartel. Jordan Peel calls KEANU "the most expensive adorable-kitten video of all time,” but that "it’s meant to satirize how pop culture paints masculinity and what it means to be African-American — and how many of us don’t fit into the mold expected of us.”
MONEY MONSTER (May 13, 2016)
In the Jodie Foster directed MONEY MONSTER, George Clooney plays Lee Gates, a financial guru who "uses his whiz-bang television show to tout stocks to viewers who can’t tell their bulls from their bears." However a young man (Jack O'Connell) then hijacks the live broadcast and takes Gates hostage after becoming distraught over losing his family's life savings on a failed investment.
DEEPWATER HORIZON (September 30, 2016)
Peter Berg reunites with his LONE SURVIVOR star Mark Wahlberg for DEEPWATER HORIZON, which is based on the real-life Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion of 2010 which killed 11 of the rig workers and is considered to be one of the biggest environmental disasters in U.S. history. DEEPWATER HORIZON will take us inside that event and capture the heroics of the workers as they struggle to stay alive and escape.
THE CONJURING 2: THE ENFIELD POLTERGEIST (June 10, 2016)
Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga return as paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren in THE CONJURING sequel, which sees the pair traveling to England in order to help Peggy Hodgson and her four children dealing with a haunting in their home, which seems to be focusing on Peggy's young daughter Janet (Madison Wolfe).
THE FREE STATE OF JONES (May 13, 2016)
Matthew McConaughey plays Newt Knight in THE FREE STATE OF JONES, a Mississippi farmer who leads an anti-Confederate rebellion. McConaughey says that the film is "a story about America and its relation with the individual and freedom, the period of Reconstruction following the Civil War is still under construction today. Why we were divided by race instead of being united by class didn’t make sense to Newt Knight back then, and it wouldn’t make sense to him today.”
LA LA LAND (July 15, 2016)
Damien Chazelle's followup to WHIPLASH is a musical set in modern-day L.A. by the name of LA LA LAND. Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling star in the film which has been influenced by many of the classic Hollywood musicals, including the scene pictured above which shows the pair expressing "their blossoming love for each other via a Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers-inspired dance."
NEIGHBORS 2: SORORITY RISING (May 20, 2016)
Seth Rogen, Rose Byrne, and Zac Efron return for the sequel to NEIGHBORS, which will see the trio dealing with the sudden appearance of a sorority on their block, which counts Chloë Grace Moretz and Selena Gomez among its members. Apparently we can look forward to more hard partying in the sequel, including a "disorienting hall-of-mirrors rave and a down-and-dirty Mad Max-inspired tailgate."
THE JUNGLE BOOK (April 15, 2016)
Jon Favreau's THE JUNGLE BOOK features an amazing cast of actors, the majority of whom are hidden behind mocap suits. One of the few human characters in the film is played by Neel Sethi, who Jon Favreau says was selected from over 2,000 auditionees. The director added that "there was a certain quality we wanted, and we knew he was going to have to carry the film, so it was going to have to be somebody that had a certain charisma, a certain charm and certain qualities that I remember from the cartoon." Mowgli and Raksha (Lupita Nyong'o), one of his adoptive parents, can be seen above.
These are only just a few of the many films which we'll see on our screens next year, I can't wait.