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10 Most Anticipated Animated Films of 2022

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10 Most Anticipated Animated Films of 2022

While animation may not take up as much space on the roster out of the hundreds of films that come out of Hollywood every year, the ones that do break out onto the big screen and major streaming platforms reliably stick out in the hearts and minds of both audiences and critics. From original passion projects to studio sequels to small studio projects, animated films come in a wide variety due to the very nature of the medium and can range from character-driven comedies to high-concept spectacles.

In the 20 years since the medium has entered the major awards race with the advent of the Best Animated Feature Oscar, animated films have sought to advance further and further every year in their technological prowess and storytelling finesse to earn critical prestige. This year is already teeing up to be a standout year for animated films so here are ten of the most hotly anticipated toons of ‘22!

RELATED: The 10 Best Animated Movies of 2021, Ranked

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10. DC League of Super-Pets

In concept alone, DC League of Super-Pets has the makings of a family, four-quadrant audience pleaser. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson stars as Krypto the Superdog, who leads a team of shelter pets, newly gifted with fantastic powers, to save the Justice League and become unlikely heroes of Metropolis. From the creative team of John Whittington and Jared Stern, who have lovingly lampooned the DC Universe previously with The LEGO Batman Movie, Super-Pets looks to combine the celebrity-voice animal hijinks of The Secret Life of Pets with a comic book genre self-awareness that will make for a fun family night at the movies.

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9. Illumination’s Super Mario Movie

The Chris Pratt animation invasion continues with the Illumination/Nintendo collaboration to bring the Mushroom Kingdom to the big screen for the first time in over 30 years. Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic, the team behind Cartoon Network’s mega-hit Teen Titans GO!, helm the yet-to-be-titled Super Mario Bros. animated feature overseen by creator Shigeru Miyamoto. Although not much else has been revealed about the film yet, the voice cast has raised the collective eyebrows of the entire internet over the casting of Chris Pratt, Jack Black, and Seth Rogen, among others, as popular video game icons. Only time will tell if this cinematic adventure will yield a more faithful adaptation of the games than the 1993 live-action version.

8. Wendell and Wild

From legendary director Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas, Coraline), Wendell and Wild has been in development for over half a decade and has finally found a home on Netflix in 2022. Starring Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele as a duo of demonic con-men brothers, Wendell and Wild is set to combine otherworldly macabre with fantastical silliness, all in painstakingly immaculate stop-motion animation.

7. Hotel Transylvania: Transformania

Now an Amazon Prime Video exclusive, Hotel Transylvania: Transformania is the fourth in Sony Pictures Animation’s Hotel Transylvania series. Although Genndy Tartakovsky has turned over directing duties in favor of writing for the third sequel, the film does make good on the kinetically elastic animation he had instilled in the previous films to deliver another laugh-a-minute cartoon comedy that follows the Drac Pack as they a way to undo a scientific mishap that transformed them into mere humans. The film also serves as the theatrical debut for YouTube impressionist and voice actor Brian Hull as he takes over the role of Dracula from Adam Sandler.

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6. The Bob’s Burgers Movie

After over a decade since Winnie the Pooh (2011), the grand tradition of hand-drawn animated films from Disney returns in a singularly unexpected way. With over 200 TV episodes in counting, The Bob’s Burgers Movie will catapult the Fox cult-hit Bob’s Burgers onto the big screen for the first time ever in a musical comedy helmed by creator Loren Bouchard. Fans of the off-color cartoon can look forward to seeing the Belcher family sing and dance their way through a musical mis-adventure eleven years in the making.

5. Pinocchio

The world of streaming will be seeing double of the little wooden boy this year with Robert Zemeckis’ live-action remake of the 1940 animated classic on Disney+ and Guillermo Del Toro’s long-gestating stop-motion adaptation of the original book for Netflix. Set in 1930’s fascist Italy, Del Toro’s version promises to be a darker and more twisted version of the Carlo Collodi tale and features an all-star voice cast, including Ewan McGregor, Christoph Waltz, and Cate Blanchett. With a screenplay by Over the Garden Wall’s Patrick McHale, Pinocchio will newly carve its own edge out of the living puppet.


4. The Bad Guys

In the vein of Despicable Me, Megamind, and Wreck-It-Ralph, DreamWorks Animation’s The Bad Guys posits what would happen if a villain wanted to change their lot in life for the better and become good. Based on the book series by Aaron Blabey, the film follows a ragtag pack of the most famously feared members of the animal kingdom (wolf, shark, snake, spider, snake) as they try to turn over a new leaf from a life of crime to become model citizens. The film represents a stylistic shift from DreamWorks’ most recent efforts by incorporating high-speed flourishes in animation and traditionally expressive designs.

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3. Turning Red

Director Domee Shi’s Oscar-winning short film Bao became an instant favorite among the canon of Pixar’s animated shorts, using Chinese cultural symbols and brilliant allegory to tell a universal family story. Turning Red is lotted to do much of the same in following 13-year-old Mei (Rosalie Chiang) as she learns to survive middle school amidst the discovery of her family’s mystical lineage. When Mei gets flustered, she transforms into a giant red panda in an explosion of fur and emotions. Turning Red looks to be a touching and hilarious coming-of-age story that only Pixar could pull off.


2. Lightyear

From the first Avenger to Space Ranger, Chris Evans is trading in his vibranium shield for terillium-carbonic alloy wings in Lightyear. From Finding Dory co-director Angus MacLane, Lightyear fully realizes the true-blue space hero first introduced in toy-form in the original Toy Story. The film will star Evans as the “real” Buzz Lightyear that inspired the toy we all know and love from Andy’s room in an origin story set for infinity and beyond. A sci-fi adventure unlike anything Pixar has done before, Lightyear will set a new technical standard for the studio through its breathtakingly believable, yet still expressive animation.

1. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Part One)

Move over, No Way Home! If there is such a thing as a perfect culmination of gifted animators and talented filmmakers, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Part One) has the potential to be it. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller return to write and produce the sequel to the 2018 animation game-changer under directors Joaquim Dos Santos (Avatar: The Last Airbender, The Legend of Korra) and Kemp Powers (Soul). With the promise of Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) encountering even more spider-people in another dimension-hopping superhero epic, Across the Spider-Verse is poised to become yet another artistic landmark for not just Sony Pictures Animation, but for the medium at large.

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Review: SAMARITAN, A Sly Stallone Superhero Stumble

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Review: SAMARITAN, A Sly Stallone Superhero Stumble

Hitting the three-quarter-century mark usually means a retirement home, a nursing facility, or if you’re lucky to be blessed with relatively good health and savings to match, living in a gated community in Arizona or Florida.

For Sylvester Stallone, however, it means something else entirely: starring in the first superhero-centered film of his decades-long career in the much-delayed Samaritan. Unfortunately for Stallone and the audience on the other side of the screen, the derivative, turgid, forgettable results won’t get mentioned in a career retrospective, let alone among the ever-expanding list of must-see entries in a genre already well past its peak.

For Stallone, however, it’s better late than never when it involves the superhero genre. Maybe in getting a taste of the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) with his walk-on role in the Guardians of the Galaxy sequel several years ago, Stallone thought anything Marvel can do, I can do even better (or just as good in the nebulous definition of the word).

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The property Stallone and his team found for him, Samaritan, a little-known graphic novel released by a small, almost negligible, publisher, certainly takes advantage of Stallone’s brute-force physicality and his often underrated talent for near-monosyllabic brooding (e.g., the Rambo series), but too often gives him to little do or say as the lone super-powered survivor, the so-called “Samaritan” of the title, of a lifelong rivalry with his brother, “Nemesis.” Two brothers entered a fire-ravaged building and while both were presumed dead, one brother did survive (Stallone’s Joe Smith, a garbageman by day, an appliance repairman by night).

In the Granite City of screenwriter Bragi F. Schut (Escape Room, Season of the Witch), the United States, and presumably the rest of the world, teeters on economic and political collapse, with a recession spiraling into a depression, steady gigs difficult, if not impossible, to obtain, and the city’s neighborhoods rocked by crime and violence. No one’s safe, not even 13-year-old Sam (Javon Walker), Joe’s neighbor.

When he’s not dodging bullies connected to a gang, he’s falling under the undue influence of Cyrus (Pilou Asbæk), a low-rent gang leader with an outsized ego and the conviction that he and only he can take on Nemesis’s mantle and along with that mantle, a hammer “forged in hate,” to orchestrate a Bane-like plan to plunge the city into chaos and become a wealthy power-broker in the process.

Schut’s woefully underwritten script takes a clumsy, haphazard approach to world-building, relying on a two-minute animated sequence to open Samaritan while a naive, worshipful Sam narrates Samaritan and Nemesis’s supposedly tragic, Cain and Abel-inspired backstory. Schut and director Julius Avery (Overlord) clumsily attempt to contrast Sam’s childish belief in messiah-like, superheroic saviors stepping in to save humanity from itself and its own worst excesses, but following that path leads to authoritarianism and fascism (ideas better, more thoroughly explored in Watchmen and The Boys).

While Sam continues to think otherwise, Stallone’s superhero, 25 years past his last, fatal encounter with his presumably deceased brother, obviously believes superheroes are the problem and not the solution (a somewhat reasonable position), but as Samaritan tracks Joe and Sam’s friendship, Sam giving Joe the son he never had, Joe giving Sam the father he lost to street violence well before the film’s opening scene, it gets closer and closer to embracing, if not outright endorsing Sam’s power fantasies, right through a literally and figuratively explosive ending. Might, as always, wins regardless of how righteous or justified the underlying action.

It’s what superhero audiences want, apparently, and what Samaritan uncritically delivers via a woefully under-rendered finale involving not just unconvincing CGI fire effects, but a videogame cut-scene quality Stallone in a late-film flashback sequence that’s meant to be subversively revelatory, but will instead lead to unintentional laughter for anyone who’s managed to sit the entirety of Samaritan’s one-hour and 40-minute running time.

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Samaritan is now streaming worldwide on Prime Video.

Samaritan

Cast
  • Sylvester Stallone
  • Javon ‘Wanna’ Walton
  • Pilou Asbæk

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Matt Shakman Is In Talks To Direct ‘Fantastic Four’

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According to a new report, Wandavision’s Matt Shakman is in talks to direct the upcoming MCU project, Fantastic Four. Marvel Studios has been very hush-hush regarding Fantastic Four to the point where no official announcements have been made other than the film’s release date. No casting news or literally anything other than rumors has been released regarding the project. We know that Fantastic Four is slated for release on November 8th, 2024, and will be a part of Marvel’s Phase 6. There are also rumors that the cast of the new Fantastic Four will be announced at the D23 Expo on September 9th.

Fantastic Four is still over two years from release, and we assume we will hear more news about the project in the coming months. However, the idea of the Fantastic Four has already been introduced into the MCU. John Krasinski played Reed Richards aka Mr. Fantastic in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. The cameo was a huge deal for fans who have been waiting a long time for the Fantastic Four to enter the MCU. When Disney acquired Twenty Century Fox in 2019 we assumed that the Fox Marvel characters would eventually make their way into the MCU. It’s been 3 years and we already have had an X-Men and Fantastic Four cameo – even if they were from another universe.

Deadline is reporting that Wandavision’s Matt Shakman is in talks to direct Fantastic Four. Shakman served as the director for Wandavision and has had an extensive career. He directed two episodes of Game of Thrones and an episode of The Boys, and he had a long stint on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. There is nothing official yet, but Deadline’s sources say that Shakman is currently in talks for the job and things are headed in the right direction.

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To be honest, I was a bit more excited when Jon Watts was set to direct. I’m sure Shakman is a good director, but Watts proved he could handle a tentpole superhero film with Spider-Man: Homecoming. Wandavision was good, but Watts’ style would have been perfect for Fantastic Four. The film is probably one of the most anticipated films in Marvel’s upcoming slate films and they need to find the best person they can to direct. Is that Matt Shakman? It could be, but whoever takes the job must realize that Marvel has a lot riding on this movie. The other Fantastic Four films were awful and fans deserve better. Hopefully, Marvel knocks it out of the park as they usually do. You can see for yourself when Fantastic Four hits theaters on November 8th, 2024.

Film Synopsis: One of Marvel’s most iconic families makes it to the big screen: the Fantastic Four.

Source: Deadline

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Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase Star in ‘Zombie Town’ Mystery Teen Romancer (Exclusive)

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Dan Aykroyd and Chevy Chase have entered Zombie Town, a mystery teen romancer based on author R.L. Stine’s book of the same name.

The indie, now shooting in Ontario, also stars Henry Czerny and co-teen leads Marlon Kazadi and Madi Monroe. The ensemble cast includes Scott Thompson and Bruce McCulloch of the Canadian comedy show Kids in the Hall.

Canadian animator Peter Lepeniotis will direct Zombie Town. Stine’s kid’s book sees a quiet town upended when 12-year-old Mike and his friend, Karen, see a horror movie called Zombie Town and unexpectedly see the title characters leap off the screen and chase them through the theater.

Zombie Town will premiere in U.S. theaters before streaming on Hulu and then ABC Australia in 2023.

“We are delighted to bring the pages of R.L. Stine’s Zombie Town to the screen and equally thrilled to be working with such an exceptional cast and crew on this production. A three-time Nickelodeon Kids Choice Award winner with book sales of over $500 million, R.L. Stine has a phenomenal track record of crafting stories that engage and entertain audiences,” John Gillespie, Trimuse Entertainment founder and executive producer, said in a statement.

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Executive producers are Trimuse Entertainment, Toonz Media Group, Lookout Entertainment, Viva Pictures and Sons of Anarchy actor Kim Coates.  

Paco Alvarez and Mark Holdom of Trimuse negotiated the deal to acquire the rights to Stine’s Zombie Town book.

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