The movies of 2019 are far from done with us—we’ve got roughly a month’s worth of awards season to get through first. But waiting just beyond that horizon is a rather tantalizing slate of 2020 films ready to spring us forward into the New Year.
You know about some of the big dogs on the calendar already. There are three huge musicals: Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, Jon M. Chu’s In the Heights, and Ryan Murphy’s The Prom. There’s endless ’80s nostalgia from Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Top Gun: Maverick. Wonder Woman is getting another movie, and Black Widow is finally getting one; both of those, along with Marvel’s Eternals, are directed by women, which surely will earn no attention from the internet. And Christopher Nolan has a movie about time travel!
But the most exciting thing about the vast expanse of a new year’s film calendar isn’t just the big dogs in the yard. The smaller, stranger films on the calendar carry the expectation of discovery, the risk of disaster, or the triumph of an out-of-nowhere sensation. These movies don’t exactly feature unknowns, but there’s enough of a mystery element involved, where a dynamite cast or a lurid premise holds the possibility of either greatness or folly, that makes them all the more exciting to anticipate.
Put it this way: More likely than not, we know what Spielberg’s West Side Story is going to be. We know what a Christopher Nolan mind-bender looks like. We’ve seen Wonder Woman kick butt and Maverick satiate his need for speed. But I don’t have the first idea what’s going to become of an Adrian Lyne movie in 2020 or what it looks like when Tom Hanks plays a scientist who builds a Caleb Landry Jones robot. How can the following movies not leave you giddy with anticipation?
Breaking News in Yuba County
**Director Tate Taylor’s filmography has been a mixed bag, from the Oscar-nominated The Help to the loudly-pitched adaptation of the novel The Girl on the Train to last year’s campy thriller Ma. It’s tough to know what to expect from a Tate Taylor film, other than a somewhat gaudy presentation and Allison Janney, who’s appeared in all five of Taylor’s feature films to date. Breaking News in Yuba County marks Janney’s first lead role for Taylor, in a Black List script about a woman who catches her husband cheating; he dies, and she tries to bury the body and capitalize on the notoriety. The script has been compared to the Coen brothers, but it’s the cast that is the true eye-popper here. Say what you will about Taylor’s films, but he’s been able to assemble some truly fantastic ensembles (think of how many stars of The Help went on to win Oscars). Here, Janney is joined by Mila Kunis (taking over for an originally cast Laura Dern) as Janney’s news-reporter sister, Regina Hall, Awkwafina, Juliette Lewis, Samira Wiley, Bridget Everett, and Ellen Barkin. The chaotic energy in that cast is palpable.
Deep Water
**It has been 18 years since Adrian Lyne directed Diane Lane to an Oscar nomination for the sexy thriller Unfaithful, and he hasn’t made a film since. That drought ends this year, as the director who became synonymous with the erotic thriller (Fatal Attraction, 9½ Weeks, Indecent Proposal) adapts the novel by Patricia Highsmith (The Talented Mr. Ripley; Carol). The 20th Century Fox production, scheduled for a November 13 release, will star ingenue of the moment Ana de Armas (Knives Out), alongside Ben Affleck, Tracy Letts, and Finn Wittrock, a trio who would, at the very least, make for a fascinating panel on The Dating Game.
BIOS
Try wrapping your head around this Universal release, coming October 2: Tom Hanks, America’s dad, plays an inventor and the last man left on Earth. The inventor builds a robot to keep him and his dog company. That robot will be played by Get Out and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri star Caleb Landry Jones. Robot Caleb Landry Jones! How is scientist Tom Hanks supposed to program all those twitches and tics into his system?? That’s for director Miguel Sapochnik, of Game of Thrones fame (he directed “Battle of the Bastards” and “The Long Night,” aka the Battle of Winterfell) to worry about.
Fatale
It’s an improbable team up of David Loughery, the writer of the 2009 thriller Obsessed (in which Beyoncé and her onscreen husband, Idris Elba, try to fend off the advances of man-stealing Ali Larter) and Deon Taylor, the director of the 2019 film The Intruder (where married home-buyers Michael Ealy and Meagan Good are terrorized by Dennis Quaid). This one (coming October 9 from Lionsgate) is a thriller about a married man (Ealy, again) who gets tricked into a murder scheme by a female police detective. That police detective? Is played by two-time Academy Award winner Hilary Swank.
C’mon C’mon
If you had a thousand guesses as to who Joaquin Phoenix would team up with after Joker, you would never land on Mike Mills, the director of such exquisitely delicate and humane features as Beginners and 20th Century Women. Word on the A24 release is that Phoenix plays a filmmaker who bonds with his young nephew while his brother goes through a bipolar episode. Phoenix has certainly done sensitive before (think of a movie like Her, for example), but the downshift from Joker still feels drastic.
The Devil All the Time
**Netflix is assembling its troops for another run at awards season 2020, and one of those soldiers may well be The Devil All the Time, director Antonio Campos’s adaptation of the Donald Ray Pollock novel about a post-WWII Ohio town and the collection of disparate, desperate people making their way therein. The novel was acclaimed, and the story sounds dark and intriguing, but it’s the cast here that will have eyes popping, with nearly every hot young talent in Hollywood on board, including Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson (The Lost City of Z reunion!), Bill Skarsgård, Eliza Scanlen, Mia Wasikowska, Riley Keough, and Haley Bennett. Chris Evans was originally set to star, but when Captain America had to drop out, his trusted pal Bucky Barnes, Sebastian Stan, replaced him.
Two Staten Island Films. Two!
New York City’s forgotten borough may be a lot less forgotten in 2020, with two feature films boasting about it in their titles. The first, Once Upon a Time in Staten Island, is a coming-of-age tale starring Bobby Cannavale and Naomi Watts and produced by Blumhouse Productions. The second, and by far the one you’ll be hearing about more, is director Judd Apatow’s King of Staten Island (Universal, June 19), a collaboration with SNL star and tabloid magnet Pete Davidson, who wrote the script, based on his own life. Marisa Tomei, Steve Buscemi, and Pamela Adlon are set to costar.
More Great Stories from Vanity Fair
— Why Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker: is too desperate to be loved to take any real risks
— Little Women’s man problem
— From The Irishman to Fleabag, here’s all you need to know about this year’s Golden Globe nominees
— The Rise of Skywalker cameos you might have missed
— Inside the Richard Jewell controversy—and the complicated truth about Kathy Scruggs
— Here’s why Tom Hooper’s Cats is a tragical mess of Mistoffelees
— From the Archive: Julia Roberts— Hollywood’s Cinderella and the belle of the box office
Looking for more? Sign up for our daily Hollywood newsletter and never miss a story.
Let’s block ads! (Why?)