I’ve been fascinated by shows since I was a child. I loved the heroes and the excitement—but most of all the reports. I aspired to be an artist. And I believed that I’d get to do the things that Indiana Jones did and go on fascinating experiences. Yet my friends and I had movie ideas to make and sun in. But they never went any farther. However, I did end up working in user experience ( UI). Today, I realize that there’s an element of drama to UX— I hadn’t actually considered it before, but consumer research is story. And you must show a compelling story to entice stakeholders, such as the product team and decision-makers, to learn more in order to get the most out of consumer research.
Think of your favorite film. It more than likely follows a three-act narrative construction: the layout, the turmoil, and the resolution. The second act shows what exists now, and it helps you get to understand the characters and the challenges and problems that they face. Act two sets the scene for the fight and introduces the action. Here, difficulties grow or get worse. The solution comes in the third and final work. This is where the issues are resolved and the figures learn and change. This structure, in my opinion, is also a fantastic way to think about customer research, and I think it can be particularly useful for explaining consumer research to others.
Use story as a framework when conducting study.
It’s sad to say, but many have come to view studies as being inconsequential. Research is typically one of the first things to go when finances or deadlines are tight. Instead of investing in study, some goods professionals rely on manufacturers or—worse—their personal judgment to make the “right” options for users based on their experience or accepted best practices. That may get groups a little bit out of the way, but that approach is therefore easily miss out on resolving people ‘ real issues. To be user-centered, this is something we really avoid. User study improves pattern. It keeps it on record, pointing to problems and opportunities. Being aware of the problems with your goods and taking action can help you be ahead of your competition.
In the three-act structure, each action corresponds to a part of the process, and each part is important to telling the whole story. Let’s examine the various functions and how they relate to customer study.
Act one: layout
Fundamental analysis comes in handy because the layout is all about comprehending the background. Basic research ( also called conceptual, discovery, or preliminary research ) helps you understand people and identify their problems. You’re learning about the difficulties people face now, what options are available, and how those challenges impact them, just like in the films. To do basic research, you may conduct cultural inquiries or journal studies ( or both! ), which may assist you in identifying both problems and opportunities. It doesn’t need to get a great investment in time or money.
Erika Hall writes about the most effective anthropology, which can be as straightforward as spending 15 hours with a customer and asking them to” Walk me through your morning yesterday.” That’s it. Current that one ask. Locked up and listen to them for 15 days. Do everything in your power to keep yourself and your pursuits out of it. Bam, you’re doing ethnography”. According to Hall, “[This ] will likely prove quite fascinating. In the very unlikely event that you didn’t learn anything new or helpful, carry on with increased confidence in your way”.
I think this makes sense. And I love that this makes consumer studies so visible. You can only attract participants and do it! You don’t need to create a lot of documentation. This can offer a wealth of knowledge about your customers, and it’ll help you better understand them and what’s going on in their life. Understanding where people are coming from is what action one is really all about.
Maybe Spool talks about the importance of basic research and how it may type the bulk of your research. If you can complement what you’ve heard in the fundamental studies by using any more user data that you can obtain, such as surveys or analytics, or if you can identify areas that need more investigation. Together, all this information creates a clearer picture of the state of things and all its deficiencies. And that’s the start of a gripping tale. It’s the place in the story where you realize that the principal characters—or the people in this case—are facing issues that they need to conquer. This is where you begin to develop compassion for the figures and support their success, much like in the movies. And finally participants are now doing the same. Their concern may be with their company, which could be losing money because people are unable to complete specific tasks. Or probably they do connect with customers ‘ problems. In either case, work one serves as your main strategy to pique the interest and interest of the participants.
When partners begin to understand the value of basic research, that is open doors to more opportunities that involve users in the decision-making approach. And that can help item team become more user-centric. This gains everyone—users, the goods, and partners. It’s similar to winning an Oscar for a film because it frequently results in a favorable and productive outcome for your item. And this can be an opportunity for participants to repeat this process with different items. Knowing how to show a good story is the only way to convince partners to worry about doing more research, and story is the key to this method.
This brings us to work two, where you incrementally review a design or idea to see whether it addresses the problems.
Act two: fight
Act two is all about digging deeper into the problems that you identified in operate one. In order to evaluate a potential solution ( such as a design ), you typically conduct vertical research, such as usability tests, to see if it addresses the problems you identified. The issues may include unfulfilled needs or problems with a circulation or procedure that’s tripping users away. More issues may come up in the process, much like in action two of a movie. It’s here that you learn more about the figures as they grow and develop through this action.
Usability tests should generally consist of five participants, according to Jakob Nielsen, who found that that number of users can usually identify the majority of the issues:” As you add more and more users, you learn less and less because you will keep seeing the same things again and again… After the second user, you are wasting your time by observing the same findings regularly but hardly learning much new.”
There are parallels with storytelling here too, if you try to tell a story with too many characters, the plot may get lost. With fewer participants, each user’s struggles will be more memorable and accessible to other parties when presenting the research. This can help convey the issues that need to be addressed while also highlighting the value of doing the research in the first place.
Usability tests have been conducted in person for decades, but you can also do them remotely using software like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or other teleconferencing software. This approach has become increasingly popular since the beginning of the pandemic, and it works well. You might consider in-person usability tests like watching a movie as opposed to remote testing like attending a play. There are advantages and disadvantages to each. Much more in-depth research is conducted on user experience. Stakeholders can experience the sessions with other stakeholders. Additionally, you get real-time reactions, including surprises, disagreements, and discussions about what they’re seeing. Much like going to a play, where audiences get to take in the stage, the costumes, the lighting, and the actors ‘ interactions, in-person research lets you see users up close, including their body language, how they interact with the moderator, and how the scene is set up.
If conducting usability testing in the field is like watching a play that is staged and controlled, where any two sessions may be very different from one another. You can take usability testing into the field by creating a replica of the space where users interact with the product and then conduct your research there. Or you can conduct your research by meeting users at their locations. With either option, you get to see how things work in context, things come up that wouldn’t have in a lab environment—and conversion can shift in entirely different directions. You have less control over how these sessions end as researchers, but this can occasionally help you understand users even better. Meeting users where they are can provide clues to the external forces that could be affecting how they use your product. In-person usability tests add a level of detail that remote usability tests frequently lack.
That’s not to say that the “movies” —remote sessions—aren’t a good option. A wider audience can be obtained from remote sessions. They allow a lot more stakeholders to be involved in the research and to see what’s going on. Additionally, they make access to a much wider user base geographically. But with any remote session there is the potential of time wasted if participants can’t log in or get their microphone working.
You can ask real users questions to understand their thoughts and understanding of the solution as a result of usability testing, whether it is done remotely or in person. This can help you not only identify problems but also glean why they’re problems in the first place. Additionally, you can test your own hypotheses and determine whether your reasoning is correct. By the end of the sessions, you’ll have a much clearer picture of how usable the designs are and whether they work for their intended purposes. The excitement is in the second act, but there are also potential surprises in the third. This is equally true of usability tests. Sometimes, participants will say unexpected things that alter the way you look at them, which can lead to unexpected turns in the story.
Unfortunately, user research is sometimes seen as expendable. Usability testing is frequently the only method of research that some stakeholders believe they ever need, and it’s too frequently the case. In fact, if the designs that you’re evaluating in the usability test aren’t grounded in a solid understanding of your users ( foundational research ), there’s not much to be gained by doing usability testing in the first place. Because you narrow down the subject matter of your feedback without understanding the needs of the users. As a result, there’s no way of knowing whether the designs might solve a problem that users have. In the context of a usability test, it’s only feedback on a particular design.
On the other hand, if you only do foundational research, while you might have set out to solve the right problem, you won’t know whether the thing that you’re building will actually solve that. This demonstrates the value of conducting both directional and foundational research.
In act two, stakeholders will—hopefully—get to watch the story unfold in the user sessions, which creates the conflict and tension in the current design by surfacing their highs and lows. And in turn, this can encourage stakeholders to take action on the issues raised.
Act three: resolution
The third act is about resolving the issues raised by the first two acts, whereas the first two are about comprehending the context and the tensions that can compel action. While it’s important to have an audience for the first two acts, it’s crucial that they stick around for the final act. That includes the entire product team, including developers, UX experts, business analysts, delivery managers, product managers, and any other interested parties who have a say in the coming development. It allows the whole team to hear users ‘ feedback together, ask questions, and discuss what’s possible within the project’s constraints. Additionally, it enables the UX design and research teams to clarify, suggest alternatives, or provide more context for their decisions. So you can get everyone on the same page and get agreement on the way forward.
Voiceover narration of this act is typically used with audience input. The researcher is the narrator, who paints a picture of the issues and what the future of the product could look like given the things that the team has learned. They provide the stakeholders with their suggestions and direction for developing this vision.
Nancy Duarte in the Harvard Business Review offers an approach to structuring presentations that follow a persuasive story. The most effective presenters employ the same methods as great storytellers: they create a conflict that needs to be settled by reminding people of the status quo and then revealing a better way, according to Duarte. ” That tension helps them persuade the audience to adopt a new mindset or behave differently”.
This type of structure aligns well with research results, and particularly results from usability tests. It provides proof for “what is “—the issues you’ve identified. And “what could be “—your recommendations on how to address them. And so forth and forth.
You can reinforce your recommendations with examples of things that competitors are doing that could address these issues or with examples where competitors are gaining an edge. Or they can be as visual as quick sketches of a potential solution to a problem. These can help generate conversation and momentum. And this continues until the session is over when you’ve concluded everything by summarizing the key points and offering suggestions for a solution. This is the part where you reiterate the main themes or problems and what they mean for the product—the denouement of the story. The stakeholders will now have the opportunity to take the next steps, and hopefully the will-power to do so!
While we are nearly at the end of this story, let’s reflect on the idea that user research is storytelling. The three-act structure of user research contains all the components for a good story:
Act one: You meet the protagonists ( the users ) and the antagonists ( the problems affecting users ). The plot begins here. In act one, researchers might use methods including contextual inquiry, ethnography, diary studies, surveys, and analytics. These techniques can produce personas, empathy maps, user journeys, and analytics dashboards as output.
Act two: Next, there’s character development. The protagonists encounter problems and difficulties, which they must overcome, and there is conflict and tension. In act two, researchers might use methods including usability testing, competitive benchmarking, and heuristics evaluation. Usability findings reports, UX strategy documents, usability guidelines, and best practices can be included in the output of these.
Act three: The protagonists triumph and you see what a better future looks like. Researchers may use techniques like presentation decks, storytelling, and digital media in act three. The output of these can be: presentation decks, video clips, audio clips, and pictures.
The researcher performs a number of tasks: they are the producer, the director, and the storyteller. The participants have a small role, but they are significant characters ( in the research ). And the audience are the stakeholders. But the most important thing is to get the story right and to use storytelling to tell users ‘ stories through research. By the end, the parties should have a goal and a desire to solve the product’s flaws.
So the next time that you’re planning research with clients or you’re speaking to stakeholders about research that you’ve done, think about how you can weave in some storytelling. In the end, user research is beneficial to everyone, and all parties must be interested in the conclusion.
As a product builder over too many years to mention, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen promising ideas go from zero to hero in a few weeks, only to fizzle out within months.
Financial products, which is the field I work in, are no exception. With people’s real hard-earned money on the line, user expectations running high, and a crowded market, it’s tempting to throw as many features at the wall as possible and hope something sticks. But this approach is a recipe for disaster. Here’s why:
The pitfalls of feature-first development
When you start building a financial product from the ground up, or are migrating existing customer journeys from paper or telephony channels onto online banking or mobile apps, it’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of creating new features. You might think, “If I can just add one more thing that solves this particular user problem, they’ll love me!” But what happens when you inevitably hit a roadblock because the narcs (your security team!) don’t like it? When a hard-fought feature isn’t as popular as you thought, or it breaks due to unforeseen complexity?
This is where the concept of Minimum Viable Product (MVP) comes in. Jason Fried’s book Getting Real and his podcast Rework often touch on this idea, even if he doesn’t always call it that. An MVP is a product that provides just enough value to your users to keep them engaged, but not so much that it becomes overwhelming or difficult to maintain. It sounds like an easy concept but it requires a razor sharp eye, a ruthless edge and having the courage to stick by your opinion because it is easy to be seduced by “the Columbo Effect”… when there’s always “just one more thing…” that someone wants to add.
The problem with most finance apps, however, is that they often become a reflection of the internal politics of the business rather than an experience solely designed around the customer. This means that the focus is on delivering as many features and functionalities as possible to satisfy the needs and desires of competing internal departments, rather than providing a clear value proposition that is focused on what the people out there in the real world want. As a result, these products can very easily bloat to become a mixed bag of confusing, unrelated and ultimately unlovable customer experiences—a feature salad, you might say.
The importance of bedrock
So what’s a better approach? How can we build products that are stable, user-friendly, and—most importantly—stick?
That’s where the concept of “bedrock” comes in. Bedrock is the core element of your product that truly matters to users. It’s the fundamental building block that provides value and stays relevant over time.
In the world of retail banking, which is where I work, the bedrock has got to be in and around the regular servicing journeys. People open their current account once in a blue moon but they look at it every day. They sign up for a credit card every year or two, but they check their balance and pay their bill at least once a month.
Identifying the core tasks that people want to do and then relentlessly striving to make them easy to do, dependable, and trustworthy is where the gravy’s at.
But how do you get to bedrock? By focusing on the “MVP” approach, prioritizing simplicity, and iterating towards a clear value proposition. This means cutting out unnecessary features and focusing on delivering real value to your users.
It also means having some guts, because your colleagues might not always instantly share your vision to start with. And controversially, sometimes it can even mean making it clear to customers that you’re not going to come to their house and make their dinner. The occasional “opinionated user interface design” (i.e. clunky workaround for edge cases) might sometimes be what you need to use to test a concept or buy you space to work on something more important.
Practical strategies for building financial products that stick
So what are the key strategies I’ve learned from my own experience and research?
Start with a clear “why”: What problem are you trying to solve? For whom? Make sure your mission is crystal clear before building anything. Make sure it aligns with your company’s objectives, too.
Focus on a single, core feature and obsess on getting that right before moving on to something else: Resist the temptation to add too many features at once. Instead, choose one that delivers real value and iterate from there.
Prioritize simplicity over complexity: Less is often more when it comes to financial products. Cut out unnecessary bells and whistles and keep the focus on what matters most.
Embrace continuous iteration: Bedrock isn’t a fixed destination—it’s a dynamic process. Continuously gather user feedback, refine your product, and iterate towards that bedrock state.
Stop, look and listen: Don’t just test your product as part of your delivery process—test it repeatedly in the field. Use it yourself. Run A/B tests. Gather user feedback. Talk to people who use it, and refine accordingly.
The bedrock paradox
There’s an interesting paradox at play here: building towards bedrock means sacrificing some short-term growth potential in favour of long-term stability. But the payoff is worth it—products built with a focus on bedrock will outlast and outperform their competitors, and deliver sustained value to users over time.
So, how do you start your journey towards bedrock? Take it one step at a time. Start by identifying those core elements that truly matter to your users. Focus on building and refining a single, powerful feature that delivers real value. And above all, test obsessively—for, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, Alan Kay, or Peter Drucker (whomever you believe!!), “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”
The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Mark Schaefer In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Mark Schaefer, futurist, bestselling author, and marketing strategist, about his new book Audacious: How Humans Win in an AI Marketing World. Mark is a thought leader in digital and content marketing, and in this conversation, he […]
In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Mark Schaefer, futurist, bestselling author, and marketing strategist, about his new book Audacious: How Humans Win in an AI Marketing World. Mark is a thought leader in digital and content marketing, and in this conversation, he explores the intersection of AI marketing and what it truly means to be human in an increasingly automated landscape.
We dive deep into why human-centered marketing is more essential than ever, how shared experiences and emotional marketing can outperform cold performance metrics, and why creative branding—especially the bold and unexpected kind—is the antidote to the AI-generated noise. If you’re wondering how your business can stand out in the age of AI and shifting consumer behavior, this conversation is for you.
Key Takeaways:
Human-centered marketing is the competitive edge in the AI era. While AI marketing tools are powerful, they can’t replicate genuine human connection, emotional marketing, or brand experiences built around shared values and trust.
Performance marketing has overshadowed the soul of branding. Mark challenges the overreliance on SEO, paid ads, and automation—urging marketers to reclaim storytelling, empathy, and creativity in their strategy.
Experiential marketing is key to creating emotional resonance. Mark emphasizes the need for shared experiences—both online and offline—that tap into what he calls collective effervescence, a psychological state where people feel connected, inspired, and part of something bigger.
Word-of-mouth marketing remains massively underutilized. Despite being one of the most trusted forms of promotion, most brands don’t budget for it. Building communities and customer advocacy should be a core part of any marketing strategy.
In a world of sameness, be audacious. Whether it’s creative branding or marketing disruption, Mark argues that the brands who dare to be bold—sometimes even weird—win attention and loyalty. AI can’t replicate originality.
Consumer behavior has shifted—and AI is influencing it. As consumers begin using AI to filter content and make decisions, marketers need to deliver clarity, brevity, and emotional depth. Attention is earned, not assumed.
Start with wrong to spark innovation. One of Mark’s most memorable tips: disrupt your thinking by flipping assumptions. Instead of optimizing the old way, ask what would happen if you did the opposite.
Chapters:
00:09 Introducing Mark Schaefer
00:59 Where Do Humans Fit in an AI Dominated World?
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Mark Schafer. He’s a futurist and the bestselling author of several influential marketing books, including the content code known and marketing rebellion. He’s a marketing strategy consultant to many of the world’s leading brands and acclaimed keynote speaker and a college educator. His blog Grow is one of the most acclaimed marketing blogs globally and his podcast, The Marketing Companion,
is in the top 1 % of all business shows on iTunes. But we’re going to talk about his latest book today, Audacious, How Humans Win in an AI Marketing World. So Mark, welcome back to the show. You’ve been on several times.
MARK SCHAEFER (00:45.314)
Several times almost a regular
John Jantsch (00:47.76)
So I like to start with the title a lot of times. mean, what was kind of the genesis of that for you? Or is there something going on in the world today that says we need to be more audacious?
MARK SCHAEFER (01:02.866)
Well, you know, when I, I never have a plan or a schedule to write a book. I only write a book when I see some problem going on that I get curious about. And the problem I see today is that we’re trying to discern where do humans fit in this new AI dominant world.
And we have this technology that’s nipping at the heels of our skill sets, in some cases nipping at the heels of our very careers. And so I really needed to unwind and unpack where are we going to fit, where are we going to thrive. So really the main idea of this book is to explore the
Parts and by the way, I mean, I’m not sugarcoating this saying Kumbaya. It’s all gonna be great. I’m saying no, no Kumbaya You know, there’s some serious things going on but there are some places that really are Uniquely human and it had been somewhat overlooked in the in the marketing
sphere in the marketing portfolio, I think we’ve become sort of intoxicated with performance marketing. And I mean, it’s important. And I’m talking about SEO and ads and optimizing, you know, our content and our ad purchases. That’s very, very important. But as we’ve kind of overcompensated with that, we’ve kind of forgot about the heart and soul of marketing.
which is this human connection. And so in the book, I look at things like word of mouth marketing, which we know is really important, but I would suggest almost nobody listening to this today has a line item on their budget for word of mouth marketing. I talk about experiential marketing and this idea of shared experiences, which are the, with this lonely.
MARK SCHAEFER (03:21.826)
depressed world saying we want more shared experiences and that again is a uniquely human thing and The overarching umbrella I guess is this word, you know audacious because if you’re merely competent you’re vulnerable competent is ignorable and Marketing really is is I have research in the book that shows in general how dull marketing and advertising
is and there is an opportunity to like shed that skin and really ignite something a little crazy because you know the bots are coming but we still own crazy.
John Jantsch (04:05.725)
You know, how much, again, I find myself blaming the pandemic for so many things on this show when I talk about changes. And, you know, there are societal changes that I think occurred during that period that, like I sit in a restaurant now waiting on my food to come and I watched the line and stream of people who come in and pick up their to-go order and run back to their car. And I,
MARK SCHAEFER (04:20.088)
Yeah. Yeah.
John Jantsch (04:32.676)
That came, I think, from the pandemic, a lot of that. But I also, you know, we talk about this need for human interaction, but you almost feel like people are actually withdrawing farther by choice.
MARK SCHAEFER (04:47.134)
I agree with you. think remote working is another sort of symptom of something that occurred with the pandemic. This idea of maybe more comfort with isolation. I think the other thing is that today, each of us can be our own independent media streaming channel. So we can experience our entire world.
by ourselves through earbuds. We can stream all the movies and TV and music and books that we love. And nobody else even has ever heard of the things that we’re experiencing. And that’s a key idea in this book that compared to when you and I were growing up as kids, we have a world without shared experiences. You know, when I was a kid, you had to save your money for a record album.
John Jantsch (05:24.897)
News.
MARK SCHAEFER (05:45.634)
And once you got that record album, people would come over to your house to listen to it. You’d play it over and over again. You’d sing the words, you know, on the, on the liner notes. If you wanted to see a movie, you had to find somebody that had a car. You climb in the car and then you’d have pizza afterwards. And the whole thing is a social experience that is absolutely missing from an entire generation today. And they’re, they’re, they’re, they’re crying out.
John Jantsch (05:59.824)
You
MARK SCHAEFER (06:14.52)
for shared experiences. And that’s something that we can add in our marketing portfolio. When you bring people together in a meaningful way, and it doesn’t have to be an activation, it could even be the way you hold meetings. If you bring people together in this meaningful way, it creates some sort of electric kind of experience.
It creates this thing called collective effervescence. It’s this emotional contagion of awe. It’s everyday awe of being with people and creating something new. And I think that is one of the most overlooked opportunities in marketing today.
John Jantsch (07:02.872)
One of the core ideas of the book is that we have to think about out humaning AI. Did I say that right? So how do we do that? I mean, it’s not through IQ. So how do we do that?
MARK SCHAEFER (07:09.698)
Yeah.
MARK SCHAEFER (07:19.244)
Yeah. mean, isn’t that weird that when you think about it, that this is the first time in history where a technology has come along and we can’t take another class to transcend it. Right. I mean, we’re not going to be smarter than AI. And so, you know, the idea behind the book is one of the biggest issues. Well, it’s the biggest issue for any business today or any marketing
John Jantsch (07:30.384)
Right.
MARK SCHAEFER (07:49.038)
professional today is how is awareness. How do we stand out as the signal against the noise? And again, you know, AI is, is making that even worse because there it’s like an endless infinite noise. So, so how, what can we do? And what I did, John, is I got to meet the greatest creatives in the world. And there’s a story in the book is kind of like,
John Jantsch (08:00.95)
Just make a little noise.
MARK SCHAEFER (08:18.296)
how I started down this path and one door open and another door open. And it was just incredible gift, this amazing experience. And I got to learn what are the patterns? Is there something we can learn from their success that’s scalable to every business? And what I found is that there is. So your marketing message, the story that you tell the world has three parts.
It’s the story, the narrative, it’s where we tell it, and it’s who tells it. Now, what if we disrupted one of those things? We would be doing something that AI isn’t really thinking about right now. mean, AI is looking at the whole world and kind of giving you the best average answer of everything that’s happened in the past. But if you disrupt it,
John Jantsch (09:06.874)
Trying to average it.
MARK SCHAEFER (09:15.808)
and do something unexpected. Now you are moving toward a path where you’re going to stand out. And so the book is full of case studies, full of prompts, big companies, small companies, big budgets, no budgets, nonprofits. So there’s something in there for everybody to sort of like explore these patterns and apply it.
to a business or an organization of any size.
John Jantsch (09:47.536)
Give me an example, if you can think of one off the top of your head, of how a company or a brand can really embrace this idea of everyday awe.
MARK SCHAEFER (09:56.91)
every day off. Well, the example that I think is most relevant and personal to me, and I think this would be relevant to anybody, is so I hold a marketing retreat every year called The Uprising. And the problem I solve with this is, as you know, I used to this event called Social Slam. You were there. And I mean, I was having 600, 700 people
John Jantsch (10:21.486)
Mm-hmm. Yep.
MARK SCHAEFER (10:27.03)
And it was just a blur and it was stressful and I didn’t like it. So I created this new event some years later. It’s limited to 30 people. So it’s intimate. And we’re talking about our relevance in the future of marketing. Now I put my heart and soul into this and I think I did a good job. But when I got the feedback of the event, people told me something completely unexpected. They said this
was life-changing. I thought, what? What? Life-changing? mean, isn’t that a little heavy? But I heard this over and over again. And I never really had an explanation until I connected the dots with this idea of collective effervescence. So in this group, these 30 people, we hike together in the woods. We eat together, gourmet food, and we
Actually, it’s shared family style, right? We create every single moment is created to heighten interaction, to build on ideas. And as I read this idea of collective effervescence, I got this from this book called Awe by social psychologist, Dacher Keltner. And all of a sudden, OK, wait a minute.
That’s the difference. It’s this intimacy. It’s this emotional contagion that’s happening at my event that makes it unlike anything else. And so my marketing plan is add more awe. So it’s like, how do I do it even better? How do I create even more of these magical moments that create
you know, new ideas and epiphanies in the people that are there. Just the pure joy of listening to music or, you know, singing together or something like that. you know, what, what can I do to even add more off? That’s the marketing plan for my event. And so I challenge people in the book, you know, think about what you can do with your customer interactions, with your meetings.
MARK SCHAEFER (12:55.084)
With customer events, what if your marketing plan was add more off? How would that change the dynamic and make you into something different, something conversational, something unmissable, which is what we need to do today?
John Jantsch (13:13.552)
And the lesson of course for that is, I that’s the brand people want to gravitate towards, right? And I think that one of the things that, you know, everybody talks about this platform or this new tool or this new technology and how marketing has changed. But I’ve felt for the last 10 years, the way people buy has changed more. And that that’s what we ought to be paying more attention to. And I think that that’s going to even be
More relevant, you know, because they’re able, you know, think about how they could cut through all of the noise. Like they can take our 50 page ebook and say, give me the four. They can consume with AI as well as we can produce with AI. I think that that gives them even more leverage to only interact with brands that as you say, create every day off.
MARK SCHAEFER (14:02.242)
Yeah. And that’s an extraordinary point that is quite profound, John, is that, you know, a lot of the conversations out there, a lot of the content out there is about how AI is changing our business and changing our workflow. It’s creating a lot of new tools to perhaps unleash creativity. But we also need to be thinking about exactly what you’re saying is that AI is also changing consumer behavior.
It’s changing how it’s going to consume our content. It’s going to change how people make decisions. Because generally speaking, people don’t want to do the work. They’re averse to deep thinking. And so they’re going to abdicate that in many cases to AI. I think the idea of truth is going to be sort of mixed up. And we may be turning AI to AI.
John Jantsch (14:31.472)
100%.
John Jantsch (14:47.172)
Yeah.
MARK SCHAEFER (15:00.846)
you know, to truth. So I think that’s a very, it’s a big idea and certainly a worthy conversation about how AI is going to be.
John Jantsch (15:09.102)
Well, why don’t we just collaborate on another book, Mark, you and I will write that book. Well, let’s write that book.
MARK SCHAEFER (15:12.494)
We should, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let’s do it. Let’s do it.
John Jantsch (15:16.752)
Well, I saw some research the other day and they were talking about, just a year ago, you know, how people were using AI, you know, what, what, what was the biggest use case, right? So producing content stuff you’d, you’d think, and that already in 2025, the fastest growing way that people are using AI is as a companion. yeah. And therapy. so, so that behavior that you’re talking about is happening and it will drive so much.
MARK SCHAEFER (15:26.786)
Yeah. Yeah.
MARK SCHAEFER (15:36.504)
Therapy. Yeah. Yeah.
MARK SCHAEFER (15:43.116)
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that I saw that same study and it was sort of jaw dropping. And it’s funny because the day after I saw that study, I did a podcast episode with one of my co-hosts and it was kind of a strange episode about how do you keep working? How do you keep leading a business when you’re suffering? And so my co-hosts
John Jantsch (15:51.407)
Yeah.
MARK SCHAEFER (16:13.142)
relies on AI as a therapist. She’s actually built like custom GPTs to encourage her and counsel her when she’s suffering. I thought, wow, that is something else. I mean, that is really, I mean, okay, well, it’s working for her.
John Jantsch (16:34.8)
Well, you know, the right AI bot’s probably got a lot of licenses.
MARK SCHAEFER (16:43.256)
Well, and again, this also points to, again, the changes in consumer behavior, because think about it, there’s also this emerging preference for AI, let’s call synthetic relationships. And I think this research about the therapy is sort of a leading indicator of that.
John Jantsch (17:02.746)
Bye.
MARK SCHAEFER (17:10.208)
is that you can be in a relationship with this entity that always tells you the right thing. There’s no compromise. You don’t really have to work on the relationship. you know, wow, I mean, what are the implications of that going to be?
John Jantsch (17:17.296)
Yeah,
John Jantsch (17:25.808)
Yeah. Or worse always tells you what you want to hear, which is, becomes an enabler rather than a therapist. So, so there are many, many ideas in this book that, uh, that we’re not going to get to, um, because I want to veer off to like a really goofy thing that you did. Um, and, and that’s the cover. Um, so, so talk a little bit. mean, it, it’s obviously very on brand with the book, but, but.
MARK SCHAEFER (17:29.592)
Yeah.
MARK SCHAEFER (17:33.974)
Yeah. Yeah.
MARK SCHAEFER (17:47.687)
right.
John Jantsch (17:54.011)
explain the concept behind the cover.
MARK SCHAEFER (17:56.802)
Well, this is a first in the world book and I’m very proud of it actually because it sort of demonstrates the ideas in the book. And it demonstrates it in a powerful way because if you think about books have been published the same way for 200 years, it’s almost impossible to disrupt a book. Believe me, I’ve tried. so this book, the cover of the book is a QR code. And what we did is,
John Jantsch (18:02.542)
Right.
John Jantsch (18:27.248)
For the video audience.
MARK SCHAEFER (18:27.306)
I uploaded. yeah, awesome. I uploaded the the book to a eye and uploaded some sort of generic art samples and a is generating. Abstract art interpretations of the stories in the book. So when you hover over the cover, it creates new covers endlessly.
based on the stories in the book. And we’re actually updating it every week. So there’s more and more stories that are possibilities for the cover. And people love it. It is different. And if you think about it, it’s disrupted the story. It’s disrupted where the story is told. It’s disrupting who’s telling the story. It’s not even a human. And I’m getting feedback, that even children love
playing with the pictures on the book. So, yeah, so I’m very proud of that. And yeah, thanks for mentioning it.
John Jantsch (19:35.296)
You bet. let’s wrap up today with like, if I’m listening to this and I’m thinking I need to do, I need to disrupt the narrative. What are like, what’s like the, you know, everybody wants the, me the one thing I have to do. What’s the one, two, three steps somebody ought to be doing right now to say, how do get ready for this?
MARK SCHAEFER (19:43.086)
Yeah.
MARK SCHAEFER (19:56.302)
Well, the one constant I saw in a lot of the creative thinking behind it is to start with wrong. And if you just sort of like think about iterating or changing a little bit, it doesn’t really lead to creative thinking. And some of the best creative thinking comes from, let’s flip the script and just look at what if everything was just wrong?
I I think the opportunity is this. If you look at most markets today, they’re just dull. They’re waiting to be disrupted. Every car commercial is the same. know, pizza, know, pizza is supposed to be fun and creative and the celebration. What’s the most creative thing going on in pizza? In America, we have this ad, nobody out pizzas the hut. What in the world does that mean? Can’t you do better than that? So look at, start with wrong.
That’s where we got this US brand, Liquid Death. The number one lesson I ever learned in marketing class, never associate your brand with death, right? I mean, I encourage you to go to YouTube and Google some of their ads. They’re shocking. They make you cringe. I actually was going to show an ad, one of their ads at a conference and it was turned down. They said, we can’t show that. And it’s a public ad.
John Jantsch (21:25.626)
Yeah.
MARK SCHAEFER (21:25.718)
Now, the guy who started that was not obsessed with water. He was obsessed with this idea of disrupting the market. And almost every market can be disrupted today because it’s so boring, especially in B2B. So that would be one idea. But the book is filled with so many ideas. But that was definitely a common theme I heard in my research.
John Jantsch (21:46.735)
Yeah.
John Jantsch (21:53.87)
Yeah, yeah, I laugh. My kids love like, you know, their refrigerators are full of liquid death. I’m like.
MARK SCHAEFER (21:59.918)
It’s just water!
John Jantsch (22:02.946)
Water! But I will say, you know, I mean, the message there is, you know, it’s the brand. It’s a connection to the brand. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Well, Mark, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there anywhere you’d invite people to connect with you and find out more about Audacious?
MARK SCHAEFER (22:12.814)
Fastest growing beverage brand in America. Yeah.
MARK SCHAEFER (22:26.282)
easy to find me. All you have to remember is businesses grow. That is my website. You can find my blog, my podcast, and my social media connections and the book we talked about today, Audacious, How Humans Win in an AI Marketing World.
John Jantsch (22:43.726)
Yeah, and it’s Schaeffer with one A, two Es and one F. I mean, I have to look it up every time. I’m sorry. There’s so many ways to spell Schaeffer.
MARK SCHAEFER (22:48.844)
Yeah. Well, the other day I was checking into a hotel. I said, name is Mark with a K. She said, your name is Cark?
MARK SCHAEFER (23:01.72)
So nobody can sell Mark, let alone Schaefer. So don’t confuse him, John. Just go to Businesses Grow.
John Jantsch (23:08.088)
Okay. All right. Awesome. Again, it’s so great to see you, my friend, and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.
MARK SCHAEFER (23:15.31)
Thank you, John.
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This article contains spoilers for Andor season 2 episodes 4-6. The planet Ghorman is an important part of Star Wars history, in both the Legends continuity and current canon. The Ghor suffer greatly under the Empire’s rule, and go through a tragic event known as the Ghorman Massacre. It’s been known that season 2 of […]
For some people, the summer months mean beaches and long days outdoors. For Den of Geek readers, the summer means staying inside air conditioned movie theaters and watching big budget spectacles! And boy, does summer 2025 have spectacles. But if superheroes and dinosaurs aren’t your bag, you don’t have to skip cinemas altogether this season. Everything from comedy revivals to existential horrors will be hitting screens over the next couple of months, promising cool entertainment for all. And we got it all here for your viewing pleasure.
Paul Feig continues to be one of the more mercurial figures in Hollywood. He’s directed or co-created some excellent stuff, including Freaks & Geeks, Spy, and the deeply underrated Last Christmas. But he’s also behind absolute stinkers such as The Heat and Jackpot!, making for a checkered filmography.
This year, Feig returns to one of his more successful projects with the sequel Another Simple Favor. Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick reprise their roles as the stylish, suspicious rivals Emily Nelson and Stephanie Smothers. This time, the murder that binds them occurs in Capri, Italy, promising even more magazine-spread sophistication than the first movie.
Thunderbolts*
May 2
Who can say what kind of movie Thunderbolts* will be? It follows Captain America: Brave New World, a movie that seemed to embarrass even Marvel, and precedes the highly-anticipated The Fantastic Four: First Steps. Throw in a delayed production process that lost Steven Yeun and Ayo Edebiri, replaced by Lewis Pullman and Geraldine Viswanathan, and the tea leaves might be ambiguous.
But maybe that misfit status will work in the film’s favor. Thunderbolts* walks the same path as Suicide Squad and this year’s Star Trek: Section 31 as a story about people who don’t belong together forming a team. Unlike those dismal films, however, Thunderbolts* seems to understand its ragtag place, with marketing leaning heavily on the mountains of charisma that Florence Pugh and David Harbour bring, alongside Sebastian Stan’s beloved Winter Soldier.
The Surfer
May 2
By this point, Nicolas Cage has completed his purgation from being ironically loved by the internet to actually loved by the internet, to finally recognized (again) as one of the most interesting working actors in cinema. So even the the ad campaign for The Surfer has been as spartan as its title, we can’t help but be intrigued.
Directed by Irish filmmaker Lorcan Finnegan (Vivarium, Nocebo) and written by Thomas Martin, The Surfer features Cage as a man who brings his son to surf an Australian beach he loved in his youth only to be menaced by local roughs. That sounds a lot like Cage’s recent masterpiece Pig, and some reviewers have compared it to the Aussie New Wave classic Wake in Fright, making The Surfer one of the more compelling entries on this list.
Friendship
May 9
Speaking of internet faves, Friendship stars Tim Robinson as a bored suburbanite who makes fast friends with a new neighbor played by Paul Rudd. Feeling that the bond has restored his lost youth, Robinson’s character soon becomes an obsessive and even destructive force in his neighbor’s life while alienating himself from his wife (Kate Mara).
To anyone familiar with I Think You Should Leave, that description fills the mind with images of slicked back hair and sloppy steaks, which should both excite and worry us. Robinson’s humor works great in five-minute sketches, but will that translate to feature length? Fortunately, Robinson and Rudd have Our Flag Means Death and PEN15‘s Andrew DeYoung onboard to direct.
Final Destination: Bloodlines
May 16
TheFinal Destination franchise has tried to close itself out twice, first with 2009’s awful The Final Destination and again in 2011’s excellent Final Destination 5. But Death’s work is never complete, so it’s fitting that a new entry would appear with Final Destination: Bloodlines.
To be honest, Bloodlines has some stiff competition, not only because it comes more than a decade after the last and best entry, but also because Oz Perkins already gave us a glorious pseudo-Destination this year with The Monkey. Directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein don’t exactly build the most confidence, as they won acclaim for their work on Disney XD shows. But Bloodlines does give us one last look at the late, great Tony Todd as mortician William Bludsworth, so we will be there on day one.
Hurry Up Tomorrow
May 14
On the heels of Smile 2 and Opus comes another horror movie about the plight of being an internationally beloved pop star. Based on his own album, Hurry Up Tomorrow stars Abel Tesfaye, aka The Weeknd, as a fictionalized version of himself who suffers a paranoid breakdown.
For those who only know The Weeknd from gifs, Hurry Up Tomorrow also stars Jenna Ortega as the pop star’s girlfriend and Barry Keoghan as a mysterious stranger. For cinephiles, the most compelling name on the poster is that of Trey Edward Shults, who broke out with the world’s scariest Thanksgiving movie Krisha and then followed it up with highly divisive movies It Comes at Night and Waves. Judging by Hurry Up Tomorrow‘s trailer, Shults has no intention of becoming predictable now.
Lilo & Stitch
May 23
Having already desecrated its classic and renaissance era in order to mine for ugly remakes that can be shoved into theaters, Disney turns to its oddball post-renaissance period for its latest live-action rehash. Are they remaking Brother Bear or Home on the Range, bad movies that might be improved by a second draft? Of course not! They’re remaking the good ones because those have name recognition!
Lilo & Stitch seems to repeat the exact same beats of the 2002 movie in which a fuzzy but dangerous alien (Chris Sanders) crash lands on Hawaii and befriends a lonely orphaned girl (Maia Kealoha) and her guardian big sister (Sydney Agudong). The one sliver of hope comes in the fact that Lilo & Stitch 2025 is directed by Dean Fleischer Camp, who made the delightful Marcel the Shell With Shoes On. Then again, if Camp is successful and Lilo & Stitch does well, then we’re bound to see live-action version of The Emperor’s New Groove, and no one wants that.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
May 23
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoningpromises to do what Owen Davian, Solomon Lane, and Jim Phelps could never accomplish: It will bring a stop to Ethan Hunt. Maybe. Through sure force of will and madness, Tom Cruise has transformed the Mission: Impossible franchise from a TV series best known for its theme song into a big-budget stunt spectacular in which we flock to see him risk his life for our amusement. But time comes even for Cruise, so Final Reckoning is being marketed as Hunt’s last outing.
At least he’s going out with a bang. Once again directed by Christopher McQuarrie, The Final Reckoning reveals the mastermind behind the rogue AI known as the Entity as someone with ties to the first film. Along the way, he’ll get help from his team, including mainstays played by Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg, as well as newer additions played by Hayley Atwell, Vanessa Kirby, and Pom Klementieff. Also, Tom Cruise will hang off a plane, which is what we’re really here to see.
Fear Street: Prom Queen
May 23
If you’re over the age of 25, you may only know Fear Street as the YA novels written by Goosebumps author R.L. Stein. However, the three Fear Street movies released by Netflix have been horror favorites of Gen Z, thanks to viral videos shared online. Fear Street: Prom Queen breaks from the trilogy format of the first three movies for a standalone story about scary things occurring at a 1988 prom queen race. Matt Palmer steps in for departing director Leigh Janiak, but as long as he can bring the gory thrills, Zoomers are sure to love it.
Fountain of Youth
May 23
English director Guy Ritchie continues to broaden his offerings with the adventure tale Fountain of Youth. Penned by veteran screenwriter James Vanderbilt (Zodiac, The Amazing Spider-Man), Fountain of Youth stars John Krasinski and Natalie Portman as siblings searching for the titular water source. They’re joined by a gaggle of character actors like Domhnall Gleeson, Eiza Gonzalez, and Stanley Tucci. That all sounds like a throwback good time to at least the heyday of National Treasure and Tomb Raider if not Indiana Jones. But one has to wonder if Fountain of Youth will be hampered by the fact that it’s straight to Apple TV+, dulling the sense of scale that adventure tales usually need.
Karate Kid: Legends
May 30
Karate Kid: Legends offers a rarity even in this age of IP-first filmmaking, a legacy sequel combined with a remake. Legends sees original Karate Kid Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) team with Kung Fu master Mr. Han (Jackie Chan) of the 2010 remake to train newcomer Li Fong (Ben Wang).
It’s a strange maneuver on Sony’s part, pivoting away from the very popular Karate Kid legacy series Cobra Kai, which recently ended its six season run on Netflix, and toward the lesser-loved 2010 remake. Will Legends uncover a hidden trove of fans nostalgic for the 2010 movie? Or is it time to finally bring back Hilary Swank from The Next Karate Kid? We’ll find out this summer.
The Phoenician Scheme
May 30, June 6 (wide)
Although initially panned upon its release in 2005, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou has been reclaimed as on of Wes Anderson‘s best movies (including by us!). So it’s good to see Anderson take another swing at the action genre with The Phoenician Scheme.
That said, The Phoenician Scheme does feel slightly different from most of Anderson’s movies, mostly because he’s shaking up his usual stable of players. Benicio del Toro, who had only previously worked with Anderson on The French Dispatch, takes the lead as businessman Zsa-zsa Korda, alongside new additions Mia Threapleton, Michael Cera, and Riz Ahmed. Of course familiar faces Tom Hanks, Bill Murray, and Scarlett Johansson are on hand, as is Anderson’s impeccable aesthetic.
Bring Her Back
May 30
Aussie twins Danny and Michael Philippou made the jump from YouTube to indie cult status with 2022’s Talk To Me. They’re ready to ride that momentum with their follow-up Bring Her Back, once again distributed by A24. Bring Her Back follows a recently orphaned brother and sister who come to the home of a foster mother played by Sally Hawkins, who already cares for a troubled boy who may have mystical powers. Judging by Bring Her Back‘s trailer, the Philippou brothers plan a movie just as troubling and intense as their debut.
From the World of John Wick: Ballerina
June 6
John Wick: Chapter 4 seemed to bring an end to the Baba Yaga, but you can’t keep a financially successful franchise down. Thus comes Ana de Armas in From the World of John Wick: Ballerina, complete with an appropriately ostentatious title. Even if you don’t think the John Wick series needed a movie that isn’t about John Wick, Ballerina has a few things in its favor. First, the movie sees the return of not just Reeves’ titular killer (this film is a side-quel set simultaneously during the events of Chapter 3 and 4), but also Ian McShane as Winston and Lance Reddick in his final performance as Charon. The “directed by” credit for Len Wiseman doesn’t inspire much hope, but behind-the-scenes reports indicate that original series director Chad Stahelski shot some of the fight scenes and spearheaded the reshoots. So maybe Ballerina‘s worth checking out after all.
The Life of Chuck
June 6
For the past few years, Mike Flanagan has established himself as one of the most interesting television creators working today. Although his last movie Doctor Sleep has its fans, supporters explicitly cite the Director’s Cut as the preferred version, arguing that the extended run time better suits the dazzling monologues Flanagan writes.
So we greet Flanagan’s return to the big screen with a bit of trepidation. Yes, he’s adapting Stephen King once again, and yes, he has most of his familiar ensemble in tow, including Kate Siegel, Rahul Kohli, Mark Hamill, and Carl Lumbly, alongside Tom Hiddleston stepping out of the MCU for a minute. But The Life of Chuck clocks in at under two hours, which seems like far too little time for these brilliant actors to deliver Flanagan’s lines about fate, faith, and the meaning of life. However, the buzz the film has generated out of TIFF, where it won the audience award and threw Oscar prognosticators’ end-of-year predictions into chaos (since this is a June 2025 release) fills us with curiosity.
How to Train Your Dragon (June 13)
The live-action Disney remakes can at least claim that they’re reimagining beloved classics. Great as the original How to Train Your Dragon, it’s only 15 years old. Worse, the remake seems to be using the exact same plot, the exact same CG designs of the dragons, and even the exact same Gerard Butler to play grumpy father Stoick the Vast. Why so many similarities? Because the remake is directed by the same guy who dreamed up the original, Dean DeBlois.
Still, maybe there’s some magic to be found in the new cast, which includes The Black Phone‘s Mason Thames as Hiccup and The Last of Us‘s Nico Parker as Astrid. If they can provide just enough energy, and if DeBlois can recapture some of the original’s magic he brought to the animated trilogy, then How to Train Your Dragon might stand on its own.
Materialists
June 13
Materialists may not be getting the same push as the summer’s superhero and remake entries, but it’s easily one of the more exciting movies coming soon. First, there’s the buzzy cast, including Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal, and Chris Evans. Then there’s the director Celine Song, making her follow-up to 2023’s Past Lives. Finally, there’s the design of the poster, which finds the central trio doing catalogue poses in an image surrounded by a thick white border.
Everything about Materialists recalls the adult romantic comedies of the ’80s and ’90s, especially its plot. Johnson plays a high-powered matchmaker who, against her better judgment, gets caught in a triangle. If it has even an ounce of the verve of Broadcast News and half the humanity of Past Lives, Materialists will be a favorite long after summer’s end.
Echo Valley
June 13
Speaking of big names in a low-stakes picture, Mare of Eastown creator Brad Ingelsby returns to the features with Echo Valley for Apple TV+. Julianne Moore and Sydney Sweeney play a mother and daughter who reunite after a tragedy. Sweeney may have broken out with the flashy series Euphoria, but Echo Valley may be another chance to show off the acting chops witnessed in Reality. As seen in his scripts for Mare of Eastown, The Way Back, and Out of the Furnace, Ingelsby understands the nuances of small town life, giving Sweeney plenty of room to develop a complex character.
28 Years Later
June 20
It’s only been 23 years since director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland un-nevered the world with their zombie thriller 28 Days Later, but we’re willing the fudge the math to get the pair together again. As its title suggests, 28 Years Later takes place more than a quarter century after a rage virus ravaged England. Despite the new status quo, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his son Spike (Alfie Williams) must leave their island village to face the monsters.
Back in 2002, before George Romero’s return to the genre and all of The Walking Dead, zombies felt fresh and digital photography seemed innovative. Both the technology and the genre have lost some of their bite today. but if there’s anyone who can reanimate the dead forms, it’s Boyle and Garland. We’ll see if 28 Years Later proves worth the wait.
Elio
June 20
Even though Pixar isn’t the surefire studio it once was, a new release still deserves our attention, especially when the trio of directors includes Turning Red‘s Domee Shi and Coco‘s Adrian Molina. Both helmers of two of the best recent Pixar movies, Shi and Molina are joined by Madeline Sharafian, making her feature debut.
Elio follows the titular outer-space nerd (Yonas Kibreab) as he’s somehow selected o represent humanity in an intergalactic council. If all goes well, Elio will learn about life while going through some wacky hijinks, and kids and adults alike will be moved to tears.
M3GAN 2.0
June 27
You can’t keep a viral sensation down, so it’s no surprise to see Blumhouse‘s pre-teen murder-bot make her return for M3GAN 2.0. Taking a page out of the Terminator 2 handbook, M3GAN 2.0 sees the reconstituted robot (voiced by Jenna Davis and performed by Amie Donald) doing battle with an upgraded successor called Amelia (Ivanna Sakhno).
Allison Williams is back as M3GAN’s inventor as is Violet McGraw as her charge/victim. James Wan produces again, as does original co-writer Akela Cooper and director Gerard Johnstone scripting. The question is whether this one will be as heavy on the meme-ready action?
F1
June 27
Most movie fans point to baseball and boxing as the most cinematic of sports, but racing is a pretty close third. So the prospect of seeing Brad Pitt drive fast cars is enough to get butts in seats for F1, especially with direction by Joseph Kosinski of Tron: Legacy and Top Gun: Maverick.
F1 has a well-worn sports plot, with Pitt playing a driver whose career ended with a crash decades ago but is now brought back to mentor a promising up-and-comer (Damson Idris). But racing’s all about improvisations within a set track, and if Kosinski can shoot cars like he shot fighter jets, then no one will care about familiar plot beats.
Jurassic World: Rebirth
July 2
Perhaps the greatest testament to the power of the original Jurassic Park is how Steven Spielberg‘s movie still inspires wonder no matter how many lackluster sequels follow. That said, Jurassic World: Rebirth does have a harder road to hoe, given that it comes off of the dismal Jurassic World Dominion(aka, the one with more locusts than dinosaurs).
Rebirth hopes to correct course by going back to the original. Not only is the trailer full of callbacks to the first movie, but it even boasts a script by David Koepp, screenwriter of the 1993 film. Furthermore, Rebirth director Gareth Edwards (Godzilla, Rogue One) seems to be aiming for old-school adventure in which a scientist (Jonathan Bailey) hires two mercenaries (Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali) to help him find dino genetics that could lead to pharmaceutical breakthroughs. Not exactly cutting edge in plot, but, honestly, as long as Jurassic World: Rebirth has cool dinos eating some folks in cool ways, we’ll be there.
The Old Guard 2
July 2
It’s been five years since Netflix released The Old Guard, an excellent fantasy action film based on the comic book by Greg Rucka and Leandro Fernández. In the passing years, The Old Guard hasn’t quite become the cult sensation that it deserves to be, but the story is worthy of continuing, especially if new director Victoria Mahoney can match the mixture of action and character depth established by her predecessor Gina Prince-Bythewood.
The Old Guard 2 brings back Charlize Theron as Andromache of Scythia, aka Andy, the leader of a group of near-immortals who travel the world doing good. She’s joined by newest recruit Nile Freeman (KiKi Layne) and her reliable teammates, all of whom she’ll need to counter a vengeful former lover (Vân Veronica Ngô), who spent the past centuries trapped in an underwater grave.
Superman
July 11
This late in the cycle of superhero movies, we all believe a man can fly. What remains an open questions is if Warner Bros. can make a Superman film as inspirational as the 1978 classic with that tagline in 2025. Hiring true genre aficanado James Gunn seemed like a great start, but can the guy who cut his teeth with Troma, and gleefully slaughtered Z-listers in The Suicide Squad, be the one to pull it off?
Yet with each new look at Superman, our belief grows. Rachel Brosnahan is pitch-perfect casting for Lois Lane and David Corenswet seems to embody the Clark Kent/Superman divide. After The Great and The Menu, Nicholas Hoult has become the ideal person to play the megalomaniacal Lex Luthor. Throw in a compelling supporting cast with inspired choices, including Nathan Fillion as Guy Gardner and Skyler Gisondo as Jimmy Olsen, and its getting easier to believe every minute.
I Know What You Did Last Summer
July 18
As the Scream franchise burns up the goodwill its relaunch earned with a series of unforced errors, its kid sister rises to take its place. The 2025 version of I Know What You Did Last Summer follows a group of attractive young people who get chased around a seaside town by a killer fisherman with a hook hand, all penance for some secret crime committed the previous year… just like in the 1997 film.
To its credit, the I Know What You Did Last Summer 2025 seems to recognize the improbability of its premise and leans into it. The trailer not only highlights the pretty new set of victims, led by Glass Onion’s Madelyn Cline, but also originals Freddie Prinze Jr. and Jennifer Love Hewitt, both of whom deliver some self-aware dialogue. If director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson (Do Revenge) can nail the balance of metatextual references and nasty slasher kills, Scream may indeed become the stuff of forgotten summers.
Eddington
July 18
Ari Aster made his name by shocking viewers: first with the deeply unsettling Hereditary and then with the still-beguiling Midsommar, which drove people back to his inexplicable short films, before completely baffling everyone with his comic odyssey Beau Is Afraid.
All of that’s a long way of saying that we have no idea what to expect from his latest entry, Eddington. A teaser trailer suggests that Aster’s taking a more satirical edge, as it shows a man played by Joaquin Phoenix scrolling to his phone to see ripped-from-the-headlines videos about COVID, public shaming, and MAGA protests, and here performed by actors as adored as Pedro Pascal and Emma Stone. But that sounds way too easy for a filmmaker like Aster, so prepare for Eddington to shock you in ways you could never foresee.
The Fantastic Four: First Steps
July 25
Together with Superman, The Fantastic Four: First Steps seeks to revitalize the superhero movie genre with a dose of bright-eyed optimism. And like its cousin over at the Distinguished Competition side of the street, First Steps has to cleanse public memory of some pretty terrible predecessors. It’s taking the right steps with its cast, which includes favorites Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach as the central quartet.
Adding to the appeal is the retro-futuristic aesthetic, brought to life by WandaVision’s Matt Shakman. However, that does raise questions about First Steps’ placement in the larger Marvel Universe. Will the world-devourer Galactus (Ralph Ineson) and his herald Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) destroy this world, immediately tarnishing Marvel’s brightly-hued new entries? We’ll have to wait for the post-credits to know for sure.
Happy Gilmore 2
July 25
Forget I Know What You Did Last Summer. 2025’s most surprising ‘90s come back belongs to hockey player-turned-golfer Happy Gilmore who comes to Netflix with a sequel 29 years in the making. Adam Sandler reteams with original writer Tim Herlihy for the latest in Happy’s shenanigans.
Happy Gilmore 2 finds Happy returning to the green for some reason. But let’s be honest, the reason doesn’t matter. Adam Sandler movies are mostly about watching him have fun with his friends, and that’s exactly what Happy Gilmore 2 promises, complete with appearances by Julie Bowen, Christopher McDonald, and Ben Stiller, all reprising their characters from the first movie, along with lots of golfer cameos.
The Bad Guys 2
August 1
Based on the popular line of children’s illustrated novels, The Bad Guys stars Sam Rockwell as Mr. Wolf, the leader of a group of carnivores/criminals who seek to rehabilitate their image. Thanks to its solid voice acting from Rockwell and co-stars, including Marc Maron and Awkwafina, and its use of the animation techniques pioneered by Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, The Bad Guys was a surprise hit in 2022.
The sequel hopes to continue that success, bringing back all of the principle cast, director Pierre Perifel, and the same animation engine. Following the “bigger is better” approach to sequels, The Bad Guys 2 introduces the Bad Girls, lady animals voiced by the likes of Danielle Brooks and Natasha Lyonne. As long as it can provide the zany energy that kids liked about the first film, The Bad Guys are sure to do good once again at the box office.
The Naked Gun
August 1
On paper the long-in-development remake of The Naked Gun sounds like a disaster. Who today has the same dry humor of the late, great Leslie Nielsen? Who has the same eye for parodic detail as the Zucker Brothers and Jim Abrams? Heck, does our current world of non-stop police procedurals have anything like M Squad, the forgotten show that inspired The Naked Gun’s predecessor, Police Squad?
Most of those concerns fall away when we see the first teaser for The Naked Gun 2025. Directed by the Lonely Island’s Akiva Schaffer, The Naked Gun has an inspired pick in Liam Neeson as Frank Drebin Jr., leader of a new version of Police Squad, and he’s joined by Paul Walter Hauser as Ed Hocken Jr. and Moses Jones as Nordberg Jr. Just reading that sentence boosts confidence that, somehow, Schaffer and company have figured out how to replicate the ZAZ humor for today’s audiences.
Freakier Friday
August 8
The train of long-in-the-making sequels continues with Freakier Friday, a continuation of the 2003 Disney remake with Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan. In the 2003 version, mother and daughter Tess and Anna Coleman swapped bodies, leading to good-hearted shenanigans and family bonding. The sequel doubles up with a four-way swap, bringing a daughter and step-daughter (Julia Butters and Sophia Hammons, respectively) into the mix.
Judging by the trailer, director Nisha Ganatra (Late Night, The High Note) knows exactly what fans expect from this outing and plans to give it to them. A game Curtis and Lohan throw themselves into their age-inappropriate roles and the quadruple swap changes things up just enough. Throw familiar faces such as Chad Michael Murray and Rosalind Chao from the first movie and add Manny Jacinto as a new love interest, and Freakier Friday’s set to be a warm reunion for 2000s kids ready for some nostalgia.
Weapons
August 8
Weapons director Zach Cregger isn’t a new name, having performed for years in the sketch group The Whitest Kids U’ Know and even co-directed Miss March with late co-star Trevor Moore. But Cregger proved we didn’t really know him at all with his solo director debut, the 2022 shocker Barbarian.
Weapons seeks to surprise us all over again, beginning with a cryptic ad campaign of blurry surveillance footage. Weapons presents itself as a missing persons story, dealing with the mass exodus of children from a suburban neighborhood. But if Barbarian is any indication, that premise just starts the upsetting story that Cregger wants to tell.
Nobody 2
August 15
No one watching Mr. Show in its heyday could have predicted that Bob Odenkirk would have gone from guy who shouts obscenities in sketch comedies to beloved dad who warmly greets his little women. Even more shocking was Odenkirk’s turn to action hero in 2021’s Nobody, in which he played a put-upon suburbanite who recovers his international assassin skills after an attack on his family. If that sounds similar to John Wick, well, it is written by Derek Kolstad, who co-created the Keanu Reeves character.
Nobody 2 picks up where the first movie left off, with Odenkirk’s Hutch Mansell and his FBI agent father David (Christopher Lloyd) trying to return to their old lives after the latter’s night of chaos. This time around, Kolstad shares a writing credit with three others (including Odenkirk), but Timo Tjahjanto (who co-directed the “Safe Haven” segment of V/H/S/ 2 with Gareth Evans) steps into direct.
Eden
August 22
By this point, you know what to expect from a Ron Howard movie: something that’s solidly well-made or—occasionally—a project that unintentionally unleashes nightmares upon the country, as with 2020’s Hillbilly Elegy. We’re hoping for more of the former with Eden, starring Jude Law, Vanessa Kirby, Ana de Armas, and Sydney Sweeney.
Based on a true story, Eden follows two German scientists (Law and Kirby) as they flee their home country in 1929 to settle on Floreana Island in the Galápagos. Soon others follow, creating trouble in their apparent paradise. Will the story of Europeans colonizing Latin American land provide entertainment in the year 2025 or will Howard’s style of middlebrow blockbusters be rejected by modern audiences? We’ll see soon enough.
Caught Stealing
August 29
Darren Aronofsky movies aren’t always good, but they are always interesting, so we can’t help but look with anticipation toward Caught Stealing. Working from a script by author Charlie Huston, Caught Stealing stars Austin Butler as a baseball player who descends into the criminal underworld of 1990s New York. While he’s made some out-there fantasias such as The Fountain and mother!, Aronofsky’s biggest hits tend to be gritty tales such as Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan, and The Wrestler. Huston’s writing seems to tend toward the more realistic side with hints of surrealism, which suits Aronofsky’s style just fine.
The Toxic Avenger
August 29
Video store kids of the ‘80s and ‘90s all know about Toxie, the breakout hero and mascot of Troma Entertainment. Does that name mean anything today? After all, Troma is very much a product of the VHS era when the demand for home video made a reliable market for their low-budget movies, designed to nothing more than offend moral and aesthetic taste. The Toxic Avenger from 1984 brought Troma and Toxie to the masses, but when kids today have instant access to the worst humanity has to offer, what can Troma do?
We’ll find out when the remake of The Toxic Avenger finally hits theaters this summer. Originally debuting at Fantastic Fest in 2023, The Toxic Avenger stars Peter Dinklage as janitor Winston Gooze, transformed into the titular anti-hero after a bullying accident. But the most promising part of this update is behind the camera, as actor Macon Blair, a regular of Jeremy Saulnier’s troupe and the director of I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore, writes and directs.
The Roses
August 29
Closing out a summer full of surprising sequels and remakes is the most unlikely of them all. Directed by Jay Roach and written by Tony McNamara, The Roses is based on the 1981 novel The War of the Roses by Warren Adler, which was previously adapted into a 1989 movie starring Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner, and Danny DeVito. In this version, Olivia Coleman and Benedict Cumberbatch play a successful, upper-class couple who turn destructive as they head toward divorce.
Unlike some others on this list, The Roses feels like exactly the type of movie that needs a refresh in 2025. Movies for adults have taken a backseat to the big-budget PG-13 fair of the past two decades, and we’re worse off for it. A comedy about grown ups, even grown up behaving like children, might be exactly the palate cleanser we need as we head into the awards-friendly autumn.
“The Well” was an episode full of disturbing twists. So full of disturbing twists, that there was barely time to worry about what might have been the biggest one. We have discovered at least part of the reason the TARDIS can’t get back to the 24th of May 2025. Yes, the pyramids and Eiffel Tower […]
For some people, the summer months mean beaches and long days outdoors. For Den of Geek readers, the summer means staying inside air conditioned movie theaters and watching big budget spectacles! And boy, does summer 2025 have spectacles. But if superheroes and dinosaurs aren’t your bag, you don’t have to skip cinemas altogether this season. Everything from comedy revivals to existential horrors will be hitting screens over the next couple of months, promising cool entertainment for all. And we got it all here for your viewing pleasure.
Paul Feig continues to be one of the more mercurial figures in Hollywood. He’s directed or co-created some excellent stuff, including Freaks & Geeks, Spy, and the deeply underrated Last Christmas. But he’s also behind absolute stinkers such as The Heat and Jackpot!, making for a checkered filmography.
This year, Feig returns to one of his more successful projects with the sequel Another Simple Favor. Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick reprise their roles as the stylish, suspicious rivals Emily Nelson and Stephanie Smothers. This time, the murder that binds them occurs in Capri, Italy, promising even more magazine-spread sophistication than the first movie.
Thunderbolts*
May 2
Who can say what kind of movie Thunderbolts* will be? It follows Captain America: Brave New World, a movie that seemed to embarrass even Marvel, and precedes the highly-anticipated The Fantastic Four: First Steps. Throw in a delayed production process that lost Steven Yeun and Ayo Edebiri, replaced by Lewis Pullman and Geraldine Viswanathan, and the tea leaves might be ambiguous.
But maybe that misfit status will work in the film’s favor. Thunderbolts* walks the same path as Suicide Squad and this year’s Star Trek: Section 31 as a story about people who don’t belong together forming a team. Unlike those dismal films, however, Thunderbolts* seems to understand its ragtag place, with marketing leaning heavily on the mountains of charisma that Florence Pugh and David Harbour bring, alongside Sebastian Stan’s beloved Winter Soldier.
The Surfer
May 2
By this point, Nicolas Cage has completed his purgation from being ironically loved by the internet to actually loved by the internet, to finally recognized (again) as one of the most interesting working actors in cinema. So even the the ad campaign for The Surfer has been as spartan as its title, we can’t help but be intrigued.
Directed by Irish filmmaker Lorcan Finnegan (Vivarium, Nocebo) and written by Thomas Martin, The Surfer features Cage as a man who brings his son to surf an Australian beach he loved in his youth only to be menaced by local roughs. That sounds a lot like Cage’s recent masterpiece Pig, and some reviewers have compared it to the Aussie New Wave classic Wake in Fright, making The Surfer one of the more compelling entries on this list.
Friendship
May 9
Speaking of internet faves, Friendship stars Tim Robinson as a bored suburbanite who makes fast friends with a new neighbor played by Paul Rudd. Feeling that the bond has restored his lost youth, Robinson’s character soon becomes an obsessive and even destructive force in his neighbor’s life while alienating himself from his wife (Kate Mara).
To anyone familiar with I Think You Should Leave, that description fills the mind with images of slicked back hair and sloppy steaks, which should both excite and worry us. Robinson’s humor works great in five-minute sketches, but will that translate to feature length? Fortunately, Robinson and Rudd have Our Flag Means Death and PEN15‘s Andrew DeYoung onboard to direct.
Final Destination: Bloodlines
May 16
TheFinal Destination franchise has tried to close itself out twice, first with 2009’s awful The Final Destination and again in 2011’s excellent Final Destination 5. But Death’s work is never complete, so it’s fitting that a new entry would appear with Final Destination: Bloodlines.
To be honest, Bloodlines has some stiff competition, not only because it comes more than a decade after the last and best entry, but also because Oz Perkins already gave us a glorious pseudo-Destination this year with The Monkey. Directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein don’t exactly build the most confidence, as they won acclaim for their work on Disney XD shows. But Bloodlines does give us one last look at the late, great Tony Todd as mortician William Bludsworth, so we will be there on day one.
Hurry Up Tomorrow
May 14
On the heels of Smile 2 and Opus comes another horror movie about the plight of being an internationally beloved pop star. Based on his own album, Hurry Up Tomorrow stars Abel Tesfaye, aka The Weeknd, as a fictionalized version of himself who suffers a paranoid breakdown.
For those who only know The Weeknd from gifs, Hurry Up Tomorrow also stars Jenna Ortega as the pop star’s girlfriend and Barry Keoghan as a mysterious stranger. For cinephiles, the most compelling name on the poster is that of Trey Edward Shults, who broke out with the world’s scariest Thanksgiving movie Krisha and then followed it up with highly divisive movies It Comes at Night and Waves. Judging by Hurry Up Tomorrow‘s trailer, Shults has no intention of becoming predictable now.
Lilo & Stitch
May 23
Having already desecrated its classic and renaissance era in order to mine for ugly remakes that can be shoved into theaters, Disney turns to its oddball post-renaissance period for its latest live-action rehash. Are they remaking Brother Bear or Home on the Range, bad movies that might be improved by a second draft? Of course not! They’re remaking the good ones because those have name recognition!
Lilo & Stitch seems to repeat the exact same beats of the 2002 movie in which a fuzzy but dangerous alien (Chris Sanders) crash lands on Hawaii and befriends a lonely orphaned girl (Maia Kealoha) and her guardian big sister (Sydney Agudong). The one sliver of hope comes in the fact that Lilo & Stitch 2025 is directed by Dean Fleischer Camp, who made the delightful Marcel the Shell With Shoes On. Then again, if Camp is successful and Lilo & Stitch does well, then we’re bound to see live-action version of The Emperor’s New Groove, and no one wants that.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
May 23
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoningpromises to do what Owen Davian, Solomon Lane, and Jim Phelps could never accomplish: It will bring a stop to Ethan Hunt. Maybe. Through sure force of will and madness, Tom Cruise has transformed the Mission: Impossible franchise from a TV series best known for its theme song into a big-budget stunt spectacular in which we flock to see him risk his life for our amusement. But time comes even for Cruise, so Final Reckoning is being marketed as Hunt’s last outing.
At least he’s going out with a bang. Once again directed by Christopher McQuarrie, The Final Reckoning reveals the mastermind behind the rogue AI known as the Entity as someone with ties to the first film. Along the way, he’ll get help from his team, including mainstays played by Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg, as well as newer additions played by Hayley Atwell, Vanessa Kirby, and Pom Klementieff. Also, Tom Cruise will hang off a plane, which is what we’re really here to see.
Fear Street: Prom Queen
May 23
If you’re over the age of 25, you may only know Fear Street as the YA novels written by Goosebumps author R.L. Stein. However, the three Fear Street movies released by Netflix have been horror favorites of Gen Z, thanks to viral videos shared online. Fear Street: Prom Queen breaks from the trilogy format of the first three movies for a standalone story about scary things occurring at a 1988 prom queen race. Matt Palmer steps in for departing director Leigh Janiak, but as long as he can bring the gory thrills, Zoomers are sure to love it.
Fountain of Youth
May 23
English director Guy Ritchie continues to broaden his offerings with the adventure tale Fountain of Youth. Penned by veteran screenwriter James Vanderbilt (Zodiac, The Amazing Spider-Man), Fountain of Youth stars John Krasinski and Natalie Portman as siblings searching for the titular water source. They’re joined by a gaggle of character actors like Domhnall Gleeson, Eiza Gonzalez, and Stanley Tucci. That all sounds like a throwback good time to at least the heyday of National Treasure and Tomb Raider if not Indiana Jones. But one has to wonder if Fountain of Youth will be hampered by the fact that it’s straight to Apple TV+, dulling the sense of scale that adventure tales usually need.
Karate Kid: Legends
May 30
Karate Kid: Legends offers a rarity even in this age of IP-first filmmaking, a legacy sequel combined with a remake. Legends sees original Karate Kid Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) team with Kung Fu master Mr. Han (Jackie Chan) of the 2010 remake to train newcomer Li Fong (Ben Wang).
It’s a strange maneuver on Sony’s part, pivoting away from the very popular Karate Kid legacy series Cobra Kai, which recently ended its six season run on Netflix, and toward the lesser-loved 2010 remake. Will Legends uncover a hidden trove of fans nostalgic for the 2010 movie? Or is it time to finally bring back Hilary Swank from The Next Karate Kid? We’ll find out this summer.
The Phoenician Scheme
May 30, June 6 (wide)
Although initially panned upon its release in 2005, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou has been reclaimed as on of Wes Anderson‘s best movies (including by us!). So it’s good to see Anderson take another swing at the action genre with The Phoenician Scheme.
That said, The Phoenician Scheme does feel slightly different from most of Anderson’s movies, mostly because he’s shaking up his usual stable of players. Benicio del Toro, who had only previously worked with Anderson on The French Dispatch, takes the lead as businessman Zsa-zsa Korda, alongside new additions Mia Threapleton, Michael Cera, and Riz Ahmed. Of course familiar faces Tom Hanks, Bill Murray, and Scarlett Johansson are on hand, as is Anderson’s impeccable aesthetic.
Bring Her Back
May 30
Aussie twins Danny and Michael Philippou made the jump from YouTube to indie cult status with 2022’s Talk To Me. They’re ready to ride that momentum with their follow-up Bring Her Back, once again distributed by A24. Bring Her Back follows a recently orphaned brother and sister who come to the home of a foster mother played by Sally Hawkins, who already cares for a troubled boy who may have mystical powers. Judging by Bring Her Back‘s trailer, the Philippou brothers plan a movie just as troubling and intense as their debut.
From the World of John Wick: Ballerina
June 6
John Wick: Chapter 4 seemed to bring an end to the Baba Yaga, but you can’t keep a financially successful franchise down. Thus comes Ana de Armas in From the World of John Wick: Ballerina, complete with an appropriately ostentatious title. Even if you don’t think the John Wick series needed a movie that isn’t about John Wick, Ballerina has a few things in its favor. First, the movie sees the return of not just Reeves’ titular killer (this film is a side-quel set simultaneously during the events of Chapter 3 and 4), but also Ian McShane as Winston and Lance Reddick in his final performance as Charon. The “directed by” credit for Len Wiseman doesn’t inspire much hope, but behind-the-scenes reports indicate that original series director Chad Stahelski shot some of the fight scenes and spearheaded the reshoots. So maybe Ballerina‘s worth checking out after all.
The Life of Chuck
June 6
For the past few years, Mike Flanagan has established himself as one of the most interesting television creators working today. Although his last movie Doctor Sleep has its fans, supporters explicitly cite the Director’s Cut as the preferred version, arguing that the extended run time better suits the dazzling monologues Flanagan writes.
So we greet Flanagan’s return to the big screen with a bit of trepidation. Yes, he’s adapting Stephen King once again, and yes, he has most of his familiar ensemble in tow, including Kate Siegel, Rahul Kohli, Mark Hamill, and Carl Lumbly, alongside Tom Hiddleston stepping out of the MCU for a minute. But The Life of Chuck clocks in at under two hours, which seems like far too little time for these brilliant actors to deliver Flanagan’s lines about fate, faith, and the meaning of life. However, the buzz the film has generated out of TIFF, where it won the audience award and threw Oscar prognosticators’ end-of-year predictions into chaos (since this is a June 2025 release) fills us with curiosity.
How to Train Your Dragon (June 13)
The live-action Disney remakes can at least claim that they’re reimagining beloved classics. Great as the original How to Train Your Dragon, it’s only 15 years old. Worse, the remake seems to be using the exact same plot, the exact same CG designs of the dragons, and even the exact same Gerard Butler to play grumpy father Stoick the Vast. Why so many similarities? Because the remake is directed by the same guy who dreamed up the original, Dean DeBlois.
Still, maybe there’s some magic to be found in the new cast, which includes The Black Phone‘s Mason Thames as Hiccup and The Last of Us‘s Nico Parker as Astrid. If they can provide just enough energy, and if DeBlois can recapture some of the original’s magic he brought to the animated trilogy, then How to Train Your Dragon might stand on its own.
Materialists
June 13
Materialists may not be getting the same push as the summer’s superhero and remake entries, but it’s easily one of the more exciting movies coming soon. First, there’s the buzzy cast, including Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal, and Chris Evans. Then there’s the director Celine Song, making her follow-up to 2023’s Past Lives. Finally, there’s the design of the poster, which finds the central trio doing catalogue poses in an image surrounded by a thick white border.
Everything about Materialists recalls the adult romantic comedies of the ’80s and ’90s, especially its plot. Johnson plays a high-powered matchmaker who, against her better judgment, gets caught in a triangle. If it has even an ounce of the verve of Broadcast News and half the humanity of Past Lives, Materialists will be a favorite long after summer’s end.
Echo Valley
June 13
Speaking of big names in a low-stakes picture, Mare of Eastown creator Brad Ingelsby returns to the features with Echo Valley for Apple TV+. Julianne Moore and Sydney Sweeney play a mother and daughter who reunite after a tragedy. Sweeney may have broken out with the flashy series Euphoria, but Echo Valley may be another chance to show off the acting chops witnessed in Reality. As seen in his scripts for Mare of Eastown, The Way Back, and Out of the Furnace, Ingelsby understands the nuances of small town life, giving Sweeney plenty of room to develop a complex character.
28 Years Later
June 20
It’s only been 23 years since director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland un-nevered the world with their zombie thriller 28 Days Later, but we’re willing the fudge the math to get the pair together again. As its title suggests, 28 Years Later takes place more than a quarter century after a rage virus ravaged England. Despite the new status quo, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his son Spike (Alfie Williams) must leave their island village to face the monsters.
Back in 2002, before George Romero’s return to the genre and all of The Walking Dead, zombies felt fresh and digital photography seemed innovative. Both the technology and the genre have lost some of their bite today. but if there’s anyone who can reanimate the dead forms, it’s Boyle and Garland. We’ll see if 28 Years Later proves worth the wait.
Elio
June 20
Even though Pixar isn’t the surefire studio it once was, a new release still deserves our attention, especially when the trio of directors includes Turning Red‘s Domee Shi and Coco‘s Adrian Molina. Both helmers of two of the best recent Pixar movies, Shi and Molina are joined by Madeline Sharafian, making her feature debut.
Elio follows the titular outer-space nerd (Yonas Kibreab) as he’s somehow selected o represent humanity in an intergalactic council. If all goes well, Elio will learn about life while going through some wacky hijinks, and kids and adults alike will be moved to tears.
M3GAN 2.0
June 27
You can’t keep a viral sensation down, so it’s no surprise to see Blumhouse‘s pre-teen murder-bot make her return for M3GAN 2.0. Taking a page out of the Terminator 2 handbook, M3GAN 2.0 sees the reconstituted robot (voiced by Jenna Davis and performed by Amie Donald) doing battle with an upgraded successor called Amelia (Ivanna Sakhno).
Allison Williams is back as M3GAN’s inventor as is Violet McGraw as her charge/victim. James Wan produces again, as does original co-writer Akela Cooper and director Gerard Johnstone scripting. The question is whether this one will be as heavy on the meme-ready action?
F1
June 27
Most movie fans point to baseball and boxing as the most cinematic of sports, but racing is a pretty close third. So the prospect of seeing Brad Pitt drive fast cars is enough to get butts in seats for F1, especially with direction by Joseph Kosinski of Tron: Legacy and Top Gun: Maverick.
F1 has a well-worn sports plot, with Pitt playing a driver whose career ended with a crash decades ago but is now brought back to mentor a promising up-and-comer (Damson Idris). But racing’s all about improvisations within a set track, and if Kosinski can shoot cars like he shot fighter jets, then no one will care about familiar plot beats.
Jurassic World: Rebirth
July 2
Perhaps the greatest testament to the power of the original Jurassic Park is how Steven Spielberg‘s movie still inspires wonder no matter how many lackluster sequels follow. That said, Jurassic World: Rebirth does have a harder road to hoe, given that it comes off of the dismal Jurassic World Dominion(aka, the one with more locusts than dinosaurs).
Rebirth hopes to correct course by going back to the original. Not only is the trailer full of callbacks to the first movie, but it even boasts a script by David Koepp, screenwriter of the 1993 film. Furthermore, Rebirth director Gareth Edwards (Godzilla, Rogue One) seems to be aiming for old-school adventure in which a scientist (Jonathan Bailey) hires two mercenaries (Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali) to help him find dino genetics that could lead to pharmaceutical breakthroughs. Not exactly cutting edge in plot, but, honestly, as long as Jurassic World: Rebirth has cool dinos eating some folks in cool ways, we’ll be there.
The Old Guard 2
July 2
It’s been five years since Netflix released The Old Guard, an excellent fantasy action film based on the comic book by Greg Rucka and Leandro Fernández. In the passing years, The Old Guard hasn’t quite become the cult sensation that it deserves to be, but the story is worthy of continuing, especially if new director Victoria Mahoney can match the mixture of action and character depth established by her predecessor Gina Prince-Bythewood.
The Old Guard 2 brings back Charlize Theron as Andromache of Scythia, aka Andy, the leader of a group of near-immortals who travel the world doing good. She’s joined by newest recruit Nile Freeman (KiKi Layne) and her reliable teammates, all of whom she’ll need to counter a vengeful former lover (Vân Veronica Ngô), who spent the past centuries trapped in an underwater grave.
Superman
July 11
This late in the cycle of superhero movies, we all believe a man can fly. What remains an open questions is if Warner Bros. can make a Superman film as inspirational as the 1978 classic with that tagline in 2025. Hiring true genre aficanado James Gunn seemed like a great start, but can the guy who cut his teeth with Troma, and gleefully slaughtered Z-listers in The Suicide Squad, be the one to pull it off?
Yet with each new look at Superman, our belief grows. Rachel Brosnahan is pitch-perfect casting for Lois Lane and David Corenswet seems to embody the Clark Kent/Superman divide. After The Great and The Menu, Nicholas Hoult has become the ideal person to play the megalomaniacal Lex Luthor. Throw in a compelling supporting cast with inspired choices, including Nathan Fillion as Guy Gardner and Skyler Gisondo as Jimmy Olsen, and its getting easier to believe every minute.
I Know What You Did Last Summer
July 18
As the Scream franchise burns up the goodwill its relaunch earned with a series of unforced errors, its kid sister rises to take its place. The 2025 version of I Know What You Did Last Summer follows a group of attractive young people who get chased around a seaside town by a killer fisherman with a hook hand, all penance for some secret crime committed the previous year… just like in the 1997 film.
To its credit, the I Know What You Did Last Summer 2025 seems to recognize the improbability of its premise and leans into it. The trailer not only highlights the pretty new set of victims, led by Glass Onion’s Madelyn Cline, but also originals Freddie Prinze Jr. and Jennifer Love Hewitt, both of whom deliver some self-aware dialogue. If director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson (Do Revenge) can nail the balance of metatextual references and nasty slasher kills, Scream may indeed become the stuff of forgotten summers.
Eddington
July 18
Ari Aster made his name by shocking viewers: first with the deeply unsettling Hereditary and then with the still-beguiling Midsommar, which drove people back to his inexplicable short films, before completely baffling everyone with his comic odyssey Beau Is Afraid.
All of that’s a long way of saying that we have no idea what to expect from his latest entry, Eddington. A teaser trailer suggests that Aster’s taking a more satirical edge, as it shows a man played by Joaquin Phoenix scrolling to his phone to see ripped-from-the-headlines videos about COVID, public shaming, and MAGA protests, and here performed by actors as adored as Pedro Pascal and Emma Stone. But that sounds way too easy for a filmmaker like Aster, so prepare for Eddington to shock you in ways you could never foresee.
The Fantastic Four: First Steps
July 25
Together with Superman, The Fantastic Four: First Steps seeks to revitalize the superhero movie genre with a dose of bright-eyed optimism. And like its cousin over at the Distinguished Competition side of the street, First Steps has to cleanse public memory of some pretty terrible predecessors. It’s taking the right steps with its cast, which includes favorites Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach as the central quartet.
Adding to the appeal is the retro-futuristic aesthetic, brought to life by WandaVision’s Matt Shakman. However, that does raise questions about First Steps’ placement in the larger Marvel Universe. Will the world-devourer Galactus (Ralph Ineson) and his herald Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) destroy this world, immediately tarnishing Marvel’s brightly-hued new entries? We’ll have to wait for the post-credits to know for sure.
Happy Gilmore 2
July 25
Forget I Know What You Did Last Summer. 2025’s most surprising ‘90s come back belongs to hockey player-turned-golfer Happy Gilmore who comes to Netflix with a sequel 29 years in the making. Adam Sandler reteams with original writer Tim Herlihy for the latest in Happy’s shenanigans.
Happy Gilmore 2 finds Happy returning to the green for some reason. But let’s be honest, the reason doesn’t matter. Adam Sandler movies are mostly about watching him have fun with his friends, and that’s exactly what Happy Gilmore 2 promises, complete with appearances by Julie Bowen, Christopher McDonald, and Ben Stiller, all reprising their characters from the first movie, along with lots of golfer cameos.
The Bad Guys 2
August 1
Based on the popular line of children’s illustrated novels, The Bad Guys stars Sam Rockwell as Mr. Wolf, the leader of a group of carnivores/criminals who seek to rehabilitate their image. Thanks to its solid voice acting from Rockwell and co-stars, including Marc Maron and Awkwafina, and its use of the animation techniques pioneered by Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, The Bad Guys was a surprise hit in 2022.
The sequel hopes to continue that success, bringing back all of the principle cast, director Pierre Perifel, and the same animation engine. Following the “bigger is better” approach to sequels, The Bad Guys 2 introduces the Bad Girls, lady animals voiced by the likes of Danielle Brooks and Natasha Lyonne. As long as it can provide the zany energy that kids liked about the first film, The Bad Guys are sure to do good once again at the box office.
The Naked Gun
August 1
On paper the long-in-development remake of The Naked Gun sounds like a disaster. Who today has the same dry humor of the late, great Leslie Nielsen? Who has the same eye for parodic detail as the Zucker Brothers and Jim Abrams? Heck, does our current world of non-stop police procedurals have anything like M Squad, the forgotten show that inspired The Naked Gun’s predecessor, Police Squad?
Most of those concerns fall away when we see the first teaser for The Naked Gun 2025. Directed by the Lonely Island’s Akiva Schaffer, The Naked Gun has an inspired pick in Liam Neeson as Frank Drebin Jr., leader of a new version of Police Squad, and he’s joined by Paul Walter Hauser as Ed Hocken Jr. and Moses Jones as Nordberg Jr. Just reading that sentence boosts confidence that, somehow, Schaffer and company have figured out how to replicate the ZAZ humor for today’s audiences.
Freakier Friday
August 8
The train of long-in-the-making sequels continues with Freakier Friday, a continuation of the 2003 Disney remake with Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan. In the 2003 version, mother and daughter Tess and Anna Coleman swapped bodies, leading to good-hearted shenanigans and family bonding. The sequel doubles up with a four-way swap, bringing a daughter and step-daughter (Julia Butters and Sophia Hammons, respectively) into the mix.
Judging by the trailer, director Nisha Ganatra (Late Night, The High Note) knows exactly what fans expect from this outing and plans to give it to them. A game Curtis and Lohan throw themselves into their age-inappropriate roles and the quadruple swap changes things up just enough. Throw familiar faces such as Chad Michael Murray and Rosalind Chao from the first movie and add Manny Jacinto as a new love interest, and Freakier Friday’s set to be a warm reunion for 2000s kids ready for some nostalgia.
Weapons
August 8
Weapons director Zach Cregger isn’t a new name, having performed for years in the sketch group The Whitest Kids U’ Know and even co-directed Miss March with late co-star Trevor Moore. But Cregger proved we didn’t really know him at all with his solo director debut, the 2022 shocker Barbarian.
Weapons seeks to surprise us all over again, beginning with a cryptic ad campaign of blurry surveillance footage. Weapons presents itself as a missing persons story, dealing with the mass exodus of children from a suburban neighborhood. But if Barbarian is any indication, that premise just starts the upsetting story that Cregger wants to tell.
Nobody 2
August 15
No one watching Mr. Show in its heyday could have predicted that Bob Odenkirk would have gone from guy who shouts obscenities in sketch comedies to beloved dad who warmly greets his little women. Even more shocking was Odenkirk’s turn to action hero in 2021’s Nobody, in which he played a put-upon suburbanite who recovers his international assassin skills after an attack on his family. If that sounds similar to John Wick, well, it is written by Derek Kolstad, who co-created the Keanu Reeves character.
Nobody 2 picks up where the first movie left off, with Odenkirk’s Hutch Mansell and his FBI agent father David (Christopher Lloyd) trying to return to their old lives after the latter’s night of chaos. This time around, Kolstad shares a writing credit with three others (including Odenkirk), but Timo Tjahjanto (who co-directed the “Safe Haven” segment of V/H/S/ 2 with Gareth Evans) steps into direct.
Eden
August 22
By this point, you know what to expect from a Ron Howard movie: something that’s solidly well-made or—occasionally—a project that unintentionally unleashes nightmares upon the country, as with 2020’s Hillbilly Elegy. We’re hoping for more of the former with Eden, starring Jude Law, Vanessa Kirby, Ana de Armas, and Sydney Sweeney.
Based on a true story, Eden follows two German scientists (Law and Kirby) as they flee their home country in 1929 to settle on Floreana Island in the Galápagos. Soon others follow, creating trouble in their apparent paradise. Will the story of Europeans colonizing Latin American land provide entertainment in the year 2025 or will Howard’s style of middlebrow blockbusters be rejected by modern audiences? We’ll see soon enough.
Caught Stealing
August 29
Darren Aronofsky movies aren’t always good, but they are always interesting, so we can’t help but look with anticipation toward Caught Stealing. Working from a script by author Charlie Huston, Caught Stealing stars Austin Butler as a baseball player who descends into the criminal underworld of 1990s New York. While he’s made some out-there fantasias such as The Fountain and mother!, Aronofsky’s biggest hits tend to be gritty tales such as Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan, and The Wrestler. Huston’s writing seems to tend toward the more realistic side with hints of surrealism, which suits Aronofsky’s style just fine.
The Toxic Avenger
August 29
Video store kids of the ‘80s and ‘90s all know about Toxie, the breakout hero and mascot of Troma Entertainment. Does that name mean anything today? After all, Troma is very much a product of the VHS era when the demand for home video made a reliable market for their low-budget movies, designed to nothing more than offend moral and aesthetic taste. The Toxic Avenger from 1984 brought Troma and Toxie to the masses, but when kids today have instant access to the worst humanity has to offer, what can Troma do?
We’ll find out when the remake of The Toxic Avenger finally hits theaters this summer. Originally debuting at Fantastic Fest in 2023, The Toxic Avenger stars Peter Dinklage as janitor Winston Gooze, transformed into the titular anti-hero after a bullying accident. But the most promising part of this update is behind the camera, as actor Macon Blair, a regular of Jeremy Saulnier’s troupe and the director of I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore, writes and directs.
The Roses
August 29
Closing out a summer full of surprising sequels and remakes is the most unlikely of them all. Directed by Jay Roach and written by Tony McNamara, The Roses is based on the 1981 novel The War of the Roses by Warren Adler, which was previously adapted into a 1989 movie starring Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner, and Danny DeVito. In this version, Olivia Coleman and Benedict Cumberbatch play a successful, upper-class couple who turn destructive as they head toward divorce.
Unlike some others on this list, The Roses feels like exactly the type of movie that needs a refresh in 2025. Movies for adults have taken a backseat to the big-budget PG-13 fair of the past two decades, and we’re worse off for it. A comedy about grown ups, even grown up behaving like children, might be exactly the palate cleanser we need as we head into the awards-friendly autumn.
For some people, the summer months mean beaches and long days outdoors. For Den of Geek readers, the summer means staying inside air conditioned movie theaters and watching big budget spectacles! And boy, does summer 2025 have spectacles. But if superheroes and dinosaurs aren’t your bag, you don’t have to skip cinemas altogether this season. […]
For some people, the summer months mean beaches and long days outdoors. For Den of Geek readers, the summer means staying inside air conditioned movie theaters and watching big budget spectacles! And boy, does summer 2025 have spectacles. But if superheroes and dinosaurs aren’t your bag, you don’t have to skip cinemas altogether this season. Everything from comedy revivals to existential horrors will be hitting screens over the next couple of months, promising cool entertainment for all. And we got it all here for your viewing pleasure.
Paul Feig continues to be one of the more mercurial figures in Hollywood. He’s directed or co-created some excellent stuff, including Freaks & Geeks, Spy, and the deeply underrated Last Christmas. But he’s also behind absolute stinkers such as The Heat and Jackpot!, making for a checkered filmography.
This year, Feig returns to one of his more successful projects with the sequel Another Simple Favor. Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick reprise their roles as the stylish, suspicious rivals Emily Nelson and Stephanie Smothers. This time, the murder that binds them occurs in Capri, Italy, promising even more magazine-spread sophistication than the first movie.
Thunderbolts*
May 2
Who can say what kind of movie Thunderbolts* will be? It follows Captain America: Brave New World, a movie that seemed to embarrass even Marvel, and precedes the highly-anticipated The Fantastic Four: First Steps. Throw in a delayed production process that lost Steven Yeun and Ayo Edebiri, replaced by Lewis Pullman and Geraldine Viswanathan, and the tea leaves might be ambiguous.
But maybe that misfit status will work in the film’s favor. Thunderbolts* walks the same path as Suicide Squad and this year’s Star Trek: Section 31 as a story about people who don’t belong together forming a team. Unlike those dismal films, however, Thunderbolts* seems to understand its ragtag place, with marketing leaning heavily on the mountains of charisma that Florence Pugh and David Harbour bring, alongside Sebastian Stan’s beloved Winter Soldier.
The Surfer
May 2
By this point, Nicolas Cage has completed his purgation from being ironically loved by the internet to actually loved by the internet, to finally recognized (again) as one of the most interesting working actors in cinema. So even the the ad campaign for The Surfer has been as spartan as its title, we can’t help but be intrigued.
Directed by Irish filmmaker Lorcan Finnegan (Vivarium, Nocebo) and written by Thomas Martin, The Surfer features Cage as a man who brings his son to surf an Australian beach he loved in his youth only to be menaced by local roughs. That sounds a lot like Cage’s recent masterpiece Pig, and some reviewers have compared it to the Aussie New Wave classic Wake in Fright, making The Surfer one of the more compelling entries on this list.
Friendship
May 9
Speaking of internet faves, Friendship stars Tim Robinson as a bored suburbanite who makes fast friends with a new neighbor played by Paul Rudd. Feeling that the bond has restored his lost youth, Robinson’s character soon becomes an obsessive and even destructive force in his neighbor’s life while alienating himself from his wife (Kate Mara).
To anyone familiar with I Think You Should Leave, that description fills the mind with images of slicked back hair and sloppy steaks, which should both excite and worry us. Robinson’s humor works great in five-minute sketches, but will that translate to feature length? Fortunately, Robinson and Rudd have Our Flag Means Death and PEN15‘s Andrew DeYoung onboard to direct.
Final Destination: Bloodlines
May 16
TheFinal Destination franchise has tried to close itself out twice, first with 2009’s awful The Final Destination and again in 2011’s excellent Final Destination 5. But Death’s work is never complete, so it’s fitting that a new entry would appear with Final Destination: Bloodlines.
To be honest, Bloodlines has some stiff competition, not only because it comes more than a decade after the last and best entry, but also because Oz Perkins already gave us a glorious pseudo-Destination this year with The Monkey. Directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein don’t exactly build the most confidence, as they won acclaim for their work on Disney XD shows. But Bloodlines does give us one last look at the late, great Tony Todd as mortician William Bludsworth, so we will be there on day one.
Hurry Up Tomorrow
May 14
On the heels of Smile 2 and Opus comes another horror movie about the plight of being an internationally beloved pop star. Based on his own album, Hurry Up Tomorrow stars Abel Tesfaye, aka The Weeknd, as a fictionalized version of himself who suffers a paranoid breakdown.
For those who only know The Weeknd from gifs, Hurry Up Tomorrow also stars Jenna Ortega as the pop star’s girlfriend and Barry Keoghan as a mysterious stranger. For cinephiles, the most compelling name on the poster is that of Trey Edward Shults, who broke out with the world’s scariest Thanksgiving movie Krisha and then followed it up with highly divisive movies It Comes at Night and Waves. Judging by Hurry Up Tomorrow‘s trailer, Shults has no intention of becoming predictable now.
Lilo & Stitch
May 23
Having already desecrated its classic and renaissance era in order to mine for ugly remakes that can be shoved into theaters, Disney turns to its oddball post-renaissance period for its latest live-action rehash. Are they remaking Brother Bear or Home on the Range, bad movies that might be improved by a second draft? Of course not! They’re remaking the good ones because those have name recognition!
Lilo & Stitch seems to repeat the exact same beats of the 2002 movie in which a fuzzy but dangerous alien (Chris Sanders) crash lands on Hawaii and befriends a lonely orphaned girl (Maia Kealoha) and her guardian big sister (Sydney Agudong). The one sliver of hope comes in the fact that Lilo & Stitch 2025 is directed by Dean Fleischer Camp, who made the delightful Marcel the Shell With Shoes On. Then again, if Camp is successful and Lilo & Stitch does well, then we’re bound to see live-action version of The Emperor’s New Groove, and no one wants that.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
May 23
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoningpromises to do what Owen Davian, Solomon Lane, and Jim Phelps could never accomplish: It will bring a stop to Ethan Hunt. Maybe. Through sure force of will and madness, Tom Cruise has transformed the Mission: Impossible franchise from a TV series best known for its theme song into a big-budget stunt spectacular in which we flock to see him risk his life for our amusement. But time comes even for Cruise, so Final Reckoning is being marketed as Hunt’s last outing.
At least he’s going out with a bang. Once again directed by Christopher McQuarrie, The Final Reckoning reveals the mastermind behind the rogue AI known as the Entity as someone with ties to the first film. Along the way, he’ll get help from his team, including mainstays played by Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg, as well as newer additions played by Hayley Atwell, Vanessa Kirby, and Pom Klementieff. Also, Tom Cruise will hang off a plane, which is what we’re really here to see.
Fear Street: Prom Queen
May 23
If you’re over the age of 25, you may only know Fear Street as the YA novels written by Goosebumps author R.L. Stein. However, the three Fear Street movies released by Netflix have been horror favorites of Gen Z, thanks to viral videos shared online. Fear Street: Prom Queen breaks from the trilogy format of the first three movies for a standalone story about scary things occurring at a 1988 prom queen race. Matt Palmer steps in for departing director Leigh Janiak, but as long as he can bring the gory thrills, Zoomers are sure to love it.
Fountain of Youth
May 23
English director Guy Ritchie continues to broaden his offerings with the adventure tale Fountain of Youth. Penned by veteran screenwriter James Vanderbilt (Zodiac, The Amazing Spider-Man), Fountain of Youth stars John Krasinski and Natalie Portman as siblings searching for the titular water source. They’re joined by a gaggle of character actors like Domhnall Gleeson, Eiza Gonzalez, and Stanley Tucci. That all sounds like a throwback good time to at least the heyday of National Treasure and Tomb Raider if not Indiana Jones. But one has to wonder if Fountain of Youth will be hampered by the fact that it’s straight to Apple TV+, dulling the sense of scale that adventure tales usually need.
Karate Kid: Legends
May 30
Karate Kid: Legends offers a rarity even in this age of IP-first filmmaking, a legacy sequel combined with a remake. Legends sees original Karate Kid Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) team with Kung Fu master Mr. Han (Jackie Chan) of the 2010 remake to train newcomer Li Fong (Ben Wang).
It’s a strange maneuver on Sony’s part, pivoting away from the very popular Karate Kid legacy series Cobra Kai, which recently ended its six season run on Netflix, and toward the lesser-loved 2010 remake. Will Legends uncover a hidden trove of fans nostalgic for the 2010 movie? Or is it time to finally bring back Hilary Swank from The Next Karate Kid? We’ll find out this summer.
The Phoenician Scheme
May 30, June 6 (wide)
Although initially panned upon its release in 2005, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou has been reclaimed as on of Wes Anderson‘s best movies (including by us!). So it’s good to see Anderson take another swing at the action genre with The Phoenician Scheme.
That said, The Phoenician Scheme does feel slightly different from most of Anderson’s movies, mostly because he’s shaking up his usual stable of players. Benicio del Toro, who had only previously worked with Anderson on The French Dispatch, takes the lead as businessman Zsa-zsa Korda, alongside new additions Mia Threapleton, Michael Cera, and Riz Ahmed. Of course familiar faces Tom Hanks, Bill Murray, and Scarlett Johansson are on hand, as is Anderson’s impeccable aesthetic.
Bring Her Back
May 30
Aussie twins Danny and Michael Philippou made the jump from YouTube to indie cult status with 2022’s Talk To Me. They’re ready to ride that momentum with their follow-up Bring Her Back, once again distributed by A24. Bring Her Back follows a recently orphaned brother and sister who come to the home of a foster mother played by Sally Hawkins, who already cares for a troubled boy who may have mystical powers. Judging by Bring Her Back‘s trailer, the Philippou brothers plan a movie just as troubling and intense as their debut.
From the World of John Wick: Ballerina
June 6
John Wick: Chapter 4 seemed to bring an end to the Baba Yaga, but you can’t keep a financially successful franchise down. Thus comes Ana de Armas in From the World of John Wick: Ballerina, complete with an appropriately ostentatious title. Even if you don’t think the John Wick series needed a movie that isn’t about John Wick, Ballerina has a few things in its favor. First, the movie sees the return of not just Reeves’ titular killer (this film is a side-quel set simultaneously during the events of Chapter 3 and 4), but also Ian McShane as Winston and Lance Reddick in his final performance as Charon. The “directed by” credit for Len Wiseman doesn’t inspire much hope, but behind-the-scenes reports indicate that original series director Chad Stahelski shot some of the fight scenes and spearheaded the reshoots. So maybe Ballerina‘s worth checking out after all.
The Life of Chuck
June 6
For the past few years, Mike Flanagan has established himself as one of the most interesting television creators working today. Although his last movie Doctor Sleep has its fans, supporters explicitly cite the Director’s Cut as the preferred version, arguing that the extended run time better suits the dazzling monologues Flanagan writes.
So we greet Flanagan’s return to the big screen with a bit of trepidation. Yes, he’s adapting Stephen King once again, and yes, he has most of his familiar ensemble in tow, including Kate Siegel, Rahul Kohli, Mark Hamill, and Carl Lumbly, alongside Tom Hiddleston stepping out of the MCU for a minute. But The Life of Chuck clocks in at under two hours, which seems like far too little time for these brilliant actors to deliver Flanagan’s lines about fate, faith, and the meaning of life. However, the buzz the film has generated out of TIFF, where it won the audience award and threw Oscar prognosticators’ end-of-year predictions into chaos (since this is a June 2025 release) fills us with curiosity.
How to Train Your Dragon (June 13)
The live-action Disney remakes can at least claim that they’re reimagining beloved classics. Great as the original How to Train Your Dragon, it’s only 15 years old. Worse, the remake seems to be using the exact same plot, the exact same CG designs of the dragons, and even the exact same Gerard Butler to play grumpy father Stoick the Vast. Why so many similarities? Because the remake is directed by the same guy who dreamed up the original, Dean DeBlois.
Still, maybe there’s some magic to be found in the new cast, which includes The Black Phone‘s Mason Thames as Hiccup and The Last of Us‘s Nico Parker as Astrid. If they can provide just enough energy, and if DeBlois can recapture some of the original’s magic he brought to the animated trilogy, then How to Train Your Dragon might stand on its own.
Materialists
June 13
Materialists may not be getting the same push as the summer’s superhero and remake entries, but it’s easily one of the more exciting movies coming soon. First, there’s the buzzy cast, including Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal, and Chris Evans. Then there’s the director Celine Song, making her follow-up to 2023’s Past Lives. Finally, there’s the design of the poster, which finds the central trio doing catalogue poses in an image surrounded by a thick white border.
Everything about Materialists recalls the adult romantic comedies of the ’80s and ’90s, especially its plot. Johnson plays a high-powered matchmaker who, against her better judgment, gets caught in a triangle. If it has even an ounce of the verve of Broadcast News and half the humanity of Past Lives, Materialists will be a favorite long after summer’s end.
Echo Valley
June 13
Speaking of big names in a low-stakes picture, Mare of Eastown creator Brad Ingelsby returns to the features with Echo Valley for Apple TV+. Julianne Moore and Sydney Sweeney play a mother and daughter who reunite after a tragedy. Sweeney may have broken out with the flashy series Euphoria, but Echo Valley may be another chance to show off the acting chops witnessed in Reality. As seen in his scripts for Mare of Eastown, The Way Back, and Out of the Furnace, Ingelsby understands the nuances of small town life, giving Sweeney plenty of room to develop a complex character.
28 Years Later
June 20
It’s only been 23 years since director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland un-nevered the world with their zombie thriller 28 Days Later, but we’re willing the fudge the math to get the pair together again. As its title suggests, 28 Years Later takes place more than a quarter century after a rage virus ravaged England. Despite the new status quo, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his son Spike (Alfie Williams) must leave their island village to face the monsters.
Back in 2002, before George Romero’s return to the genre and all of The Walking Dead, zombies felt fresh and digital photography seemed innovative. Both the technology and the genre have lost some of their bite today. but if there’s anyone who can reanimate the dead forms, it’s Boyle and Garland. We’ll see if 28 Years Later proves worth the wait.
Elio
June 20
Even though Pixar isn’t the surefire studio it once was, a new release still deserves our attention, especially when the trio of directors includes Turning Red‘s Domee Shi and Coco‘s Adrian Molina. Both helmers of two of the best recent Pixar movies, Shi and Molina are joined by Madeline Sharafian, making her feature debut.
Elio follows the titular outer-space nerd (Yonas Kibreab) as he’s somehow selected o represent humanity in an intergalactic council. If all goes well, Elio will learn about life while going through some wacky hijinks, and kids and adults alike will be moved to tears.
M3GAN 2.0
June 27
You can’t keep a viral sensation down, so it’s no surprise to see Blumhouse‘s pre-teen murder-bot make her return for M3GAN 2.0. Taking a page out of the Terminator 2 handbook, M3GAN 2.0 sees the reconstituted robot (voiced by Jenna Davis and performed by Amie Donald) doing battle with an upgraded successor called Amelia (Ivanna Sakhno).
Allison Williams is back as M3GAN’s inventor as is Violet McGraw as her charge/victim. James Wan produces again, as does original co-writer Akela Cooper and director Gerard Johnstone scripting. The question is whether this one will be as heavy on the meme-ready action?
F1
June 27
Most movie fans point to baseball and boxing as the most cinematic of sports, but racing is a pretty close third. So the prospect of seeing Brad Pitt drive fast cars is enough to get butts in seats for F1, especially with direction by Joseph Kosinski of Tron: Legacy and Top Gun: Maverick.
F1 has a well-worn sports plot, with Pitt playing a driver whose career ended with a crash decades ago but is now brought back to mentor a promising up-and-comer (Damson Idris). But racing’s all about improvisations within a set track, and if Kosinski can shoot cars like he shot fighter jets, then no one will care about familiar plot beats.
Jurassic World: Rebirth
July 2
Perhaps the greatest testament to the power of the original Jurassic Park is how Steven Spielberg‘s movie still inspires wonder no matter how many lackluster sequels follow. That said, Jurassic World: Rebirth does have a harder road to hoe, given that it comes off of the dismal Jurassic World Dominion(aka, the one with more locusts than dinosaurs).
Rebirth hopes to correct course by going back to the original. Not only is the trailer full of callbacks to the first movie, but it even boasts a script by David Koepp, screenwriter of the 1993 film. Furthermore, Rebirth director Gareth Edwards (Godzilla, Rogue One) seems to be aiming for old-school adventure in which a scientist (Jonathan Bailey) hires two mercenaries (Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali) to help him find dino genetics that could lead to pharmaceutical breakthroughs. Not exactly cutting edge in plot, but, honestly, as long as Jurassic World: Rebirth has cool dinos eating some folks in cool ways, we’ll be there.
The Old Guard 2
July 2
It’s been five years since Netflix released The Old Guard, an excellent fantasy action film based on the comic book by Greg Rucka and Leandro Fernández. In the passing years, The Old Guard hasn’t quite become the cult sensation that it deserves to be, but the story is worthy of continuing, especially if new director Victoria Mahoney can match the mixture of action and character depth established by her predecessor Gina Prince-Bythewood.
The Old Guard 2 brings back Charlize Theron as Andromache of Scythia, aka Andy, the leader of a group of near-immortals who travel the world doing good. She’s joined by newest recruit Nile Freeman (KiKi Layne) and her reliable teammates, all of whom she’ll need to counter a vengeful former lover (Vân Veronica Ngô), who spent the past centuries trapped in an underwater grave.
Superman
July 11
This late in the cycle of superhero movies, we all believe a man can fly. What remains an open questions is if Warner Bros. can make a Superman film as inspirational as the 1978 classic with that tagline in 2025. Hiring true genre aficanado James Gunn seemed like a great start, but can the guy who cut his teeth with Troma, and gleefully slaughtered Z-listers in The Suicide Squad, be the one to pull it off?
Yet with each new look at Superman, our belief grows. Rachel Brosnahan is pitch-perfect casting for Lois Lane and David Corenswet seems to embody the Clark Kent/Superman divide. After The Great and The Menu, Nicholas Hoult has become the ideal person to play the megalomaniacal Lex Luthor. Throw in a compelling supporting cast with inspired choices, including Nathan Fillion as Guy Gardner and Skyler Gisondo as Jimmy Olsen, and its getting easier to believe every minute.
I Know What You Did Last Summer
July 18
As the Scream franchise burns up the goodwill its relaunch earned with a series of unforced errors, its kid sister rises to take its place. The 2025 version of I Know What You Did Last Summer follows a group of attractive young people who get chased around a seaside town by a killer fisherman with a hook hand, all penance for some secret crime committed the previous year… just like in the 1997 film.
To its credit, the I Know What You Did Last Summer 2025 seems to recognize the improbability of its premise and leans into it. The trailer not only highlights the pretty new set of victims, led by Glass Onion’s Madelyn Cline, but also originals Freddie Prinze Jr. and Jennifer Love Hewitt, both of whom deliver some self-aware dialogue. If director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson (Do Revenge) can nail the balance of metatextual references and nasty slasher kills, Scream may indeed become the stuff of forgotten summers.
Eddington
July 18
Ari Aster made his name by shocking viewers: first with the deeply unsettling Hereditary and then with the still-beguiling Midsommar, which drove people back to his inexplicable short films, before completely baffling everyone with his comic odyssey Beau Is Afraid.
All of that’s a long way of saying that we have no idea what to expect from his latest entry, Eddington. A teaser trailer suggests that Aster’s taking a more satirical edge, as it shows a man played by Joaquin Phoenix scrolling to his phone to see ripped-from-the-headlines videos about COVID, public shaming, and MAGA protests, and here performed by actors as adored as Pedro Pascal and Emma Stone. But that sounds way too easy for a filmmaker like Aster, so prepare for Eddington to shock you in ways you could never foresee.
The Fantastic Four: First Steps
July 25
Together with Superman, The Fantastic Four: First Steps seeks to revitalize the superhero movie genre with a dose of bright-eyed optimism. And like its cousin over at the Distinguished Competition side of the street, First Steps has to cleanse public memory of some pretty terrible predecessors. It’s taking the right steps with its cast, which includes favorites Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach as the central quartet.
Adding to the appeal is the retro-futuristic aesthetic, brought to life by WandaVision’s Matt Shakman. However, that does raise questions about First Steps’ placement in the larger Marvel Universe. Will the world-devourer Galactus (Ralph Ineson) and his herald Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) destroy this world, immediately tarnishing Marvel’s brightly-hued new entries? We’ll have to wait for the post-credits to know for sure.
Happy Gilmore 2
July 25
Forget I Know What You Did Last Summer. 2025’s most surprising ‘90s come back belongs to hockey player-turned-golfer Happy Gilmore who comes to Netflix with a sequel 29 years in the making. Adam Sandler reteams with original writer Tim Herlihy for the latest in Happy’s shenanigans.
Happy Gilmore 2 finds Happy returning to the green for some reason. But let’s be honest, the reason doesn’t matter. Adam Sandler movies are mostly about watching him have fun with his friends, and that’s exactly what Happy Gilmore 2 promises, complete with appearances by Julie Bowen, Christopher McDonald, and Ben Stiller, all reprising their characters from the first movie, along with lots of golfer cameos.
The Bad Guys 2
August 1
Based on the popular line of children’s illustrated novels, The Bad Guys stars Sam Rockwell as Mr. Wolf, the leader of a group of carnivores/criminals who seek to rehabilitate their image. Thanks to its solid voice acting from Rockwell and co-stars, including Marc Maron and Awkwafina, and its use of the animation techniques pioneered by Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, The Bad Guys was a surprise hit in 2022.
The sequel hopes to continue that success, bringing back all of the principle cast, director Pierre Perifel, and the same animation engine. Following the “bigger is better” approach to sequels, The Bad Guys 2 introduces the Bad Girls, lady animals voiced by the likes of Danielle Brooks and Natasha Lyonne. As long as it can provide the zany energy that kids liked about the first film, The Bad Guys are sure to do good once again at the box office.
The Naked Gun
August 1
On paper the long-in-development remake of The Naked Gun sounds like a disaster. Who today has the same dry humor of the late, great Leslie Nielsen? Who has the same eye for parodic detail as the Zucker Brothers and Jim Abrams? Heck, does our current world of non-stop police procedurals have anything like M Squad, the forgotten show that inspired The Naked Gun’s predecessor, Police Squad?
Most of those concerns fall away when we see the first teaser for The Naked Gun 2025. Directed by the Lonely Island’s Akiva Schaffer, The Naked Gun has an inspired pick in Liam Neeson as Frank Drebin Jr., leader of a new version of Police Squad, and he’s joined by Paul Walter Hauser as Ed Hocken Jr. and Moses Jones as Nordberg Jr. Just reading that sentence boosts confidence that, somehow, Schaffer and company have figured out how to replicate the ZAZ humor for today’s audiences.
Freakier Friday
August 8
The train of long-in-the-making sequels continues with Freakier Friday, a continuation of the 2003 Disney remake with Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan. In the 2003 version, mother and daughter Tess and Anna Coleman swapped bodies, leading to good-hearted shenanigans and family bonding. The sequel doubles up with a four-way swap, bringing a daughter and step-daughter (Julia Butters and Sophia Hammons, respectively) into the mix.
Judging by the trailer, director Nisha Ganatra (Late Night, The High Note) knows exactly what fans expect from this outing and plans to give it to them. A game Curtis and Lohan throw themselves into their age-inappropriate roles and the quadruple swap changes things up just enough. Throw familiar faces such as Chad Michael Murray and Rosalind Chao from the first movie and add Manny Jacinto as a new love interest, and Freakier Friday’s set to be a warm reunion for 2000s kids ready for some nostalgia.
Weapons
August 8
Weapons director Zach Cregger isn’t a new name, having performed for years in the sketch group The Whitest Kids U’ Know and even co-directed Miss March with late co-star Trevor Moore. But Cregger proved we didn’t really know him at all with his solo director debut, the 2022 shocker Barbarian.
Weapons seeks to surprise us all over again, beginning with a cryptic ad campaign of blurry surveillance footage. Weapons presents itself as a missing persons story, dealing with the mass exodus of children from a suburban neighborhood. But if Barbarian is any indication, that premise just starts the upsetting story that Cregger wants to tell.
Nobody 2
August 15
No one watching Mr. Show in its heyday could have predicted that Bob Odenkirk would have gone from guy who shouts obscenities in sketch comedies to beloved dad who warmly greets his little women. Even more shocking was Odenkirk’s turn to action hero in 2021’s Nobody, in which he played a put-upon suburbanite who recovers his international assassin skills after an attack on his family. If that sounds similar to John Wick, well, it is written by Derek Kolstad, who co-created the Keanu Reeves character.
Nobody 2 picks up where the first movie left off, with Odenkirk’s Hutch Mansell and his FBI agent father David (Christopher Lloyd) trying to return to their old lives after the latter’s night of chaos. This time around, Kolstad shares a writing credit with three others (including Odenkirk), but Timo Tjahjanto (who co-directed the “Safe Haven” segment of V/H/S/ 2 with Gareth Evans) steps into direct.
Eden
August 22
By this point, you know what to expect from a Ron Howard movie: something that’s solidly well-made or—occasionally—a project that unintentionally unleashes nightmares upon the country, as with 2020’s Hillbilly Elegy. We’re hoping for more of the former with Eden, starring Jude Law, Vanessa Kirby, Ana de Armas, and Sydney Sweeney.
Based on a true story, Eden follows two German scientists (Law and Kirby) as they flee their home country in 1929 to settle on Floreana Island in the Galápagos. Soon others follow, creating trouble in their apparent paradise. Will the story of Europeans colonizing Latin American land provide entertainment in the year 2025 or will Howard’s style of middlebrow blockbusters be rejected by modern audiences? We’ll see soon enough.
Caught Stealing
August 29
Darren Aronofsky movies aren’t always good, but they are always interesting, so we can’t help but look with anticipation toward Caught Stealing. Working from a script by author Charlie Huston, Caught Stealing stars Austin Butler as a baseball player who descends into the criminal underworld of 1990s New York. While he’s made some out-there fantasias such as The Fountain and mother!, Aronofsky’s biggest hits tend to be gritty tales such as Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan, and The Wrestler. Huston’s writing seems to tend toward the more realistic side with hints of surrealism, which suits Aronofsky’s style just fine.
The Toxic Avenger
August 29
Video store kids of the ‘80s and ‘90s all know about Toxie, the breakout hero and mascot of Troma Entertainment. Does that name mean anything today? After all, Troma is very much a product of the VHS era when the demand for home video made a reliable market for their low-budget movies, designed to nothing more than offend moral and aesthetic taste. The Toxic Avenger from 1984 brought Troma and Toxie to the masses, but when kids today have instant access to the worst humanity has to offer, what can Troma do?
We’ll find out when the remake of The Toxic Avenger finally hits theaters this summer. Originally debuting at Fantastic Fest in 2023, The Toxic Avenger stars Peter Dinklage as janitor Winston Gooze, transformed into the titular anti-hero after a bullying accident. But the most promising part of this update is behind the camera, as actor Macon Blair, a regular of Jeremy Saulnier’s troupe and the director of I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore, writes and directs.
The Roses
August 29
Closing out a summer full of surprising sequels and remakes is the most unlikely of them all. Directed by Jay Roach and written by Tony McNamara, The Roses is based on the 1981 novel The War of the Roses by Warren Adler, which was previously adapted into a 1989 movie starring Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner, and Danny DeVito. In this version, Olivia Coleman and Benedict Cumberbatch play a successful, upper-class couple who turn destructive as they head toward divorce.
Unlike some others on this list, The Roses feels like exactly the type of movie that needs a refresh in 2025. Movies for adults have taken a backseat to the big-budget PG-13 fair of the past two decades, and we’re worse off for it. A comedy about grown ups, even grown up behaving like children, might be exactly the palate cleanser we need as we head into the awards-friendly autumn.
This article contains spoilers for Andor season 2 episodes 4-6. Senator Bail Organa of Alderaan was first introduced to the current Star Wars canon in Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, and has since become an important character in the Clone Wars era and into the Galactic Civil War. Most know him as […]
For some people, the summer months mean beaches and long days outdoors. For Den of Geek readers, the summer means staying inside air conditioned movie theaters and watching big budget spectacles! And boy, does summer 2025 have spectacles. But if superheroes and dinosaurs aren’t your bag, you don’t have to skip cinemas altogether this season. Everything from comedy revivals to existential horrors will be hitting screens over the next couple of months, promising cool entertainment for all. And we got it all here for your viewing pleasure.
Paul Feig continues to be one of the more mercurial figures in Hollywood. He’s directed or co-created some excellent stuff, including Freaks & Geeks, Spy, and the deeply underrated Last Christmas. But he’s also behind absolute stinkers such as The Heat and Jackpot!, making for a checkered filmography.
This year, Feig returns to one of his more successful projects with the sequel Another Simple Favor. Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick reprise their roles as the stylish, suspicious rivals Emily Nelson and Stephanie Smothers. This time, the murder that binds them occurs in Capri, Italy, promising even more magazine-spread sophistication than the first movie.
Thunderbolts*
May 2
Who can say what kind of movie Thunderbolts* will be? It follows Captain America: Brave New World, a movie that seemed to embarrass even Marvel, and precedes the highly-anticipated The Fantastic Four: First Steps. Throw in a delayed production process that lost Steven Yeun and Ayo Edebiri, replaced by Lewis Pullman and Geraldine Viswanathan, and the tea leaves might be ambiguous.
But maybe that misfit status will work in the film’s favor. Thunderbolts* walks the same path as Suicide Squad and this year’s Star Trek: Section 31 as a story about people who don’t belong together forming a team. Unlike those dismal films, however, Thunderbolts* seems to understand its ragtag place, with marketing leaning heavily on the mountains of charisma that Florence Pugh and David Harbour bring, alongside Sebastian Stan’s beloved Winter Soldier.
The Surfer
May 2
By this point, Nicolas Cage has completed his purgation from being ironically loved by the internet to actually loved by the internet, to finally recognized (again) as one of the most interesting working actors in cinema. So even the the ad campaign for The Surfer has been as spartan as its title, we can’t help but be intrigued.
Directed by Irish filmmaker Lorcan Finnegan (Vivarium, Nocebo) and written by Thomas Martin, The Surfer features Cage as a man who brings his son to surf an Australian beach he loved in his youth only to be menaced by local roughs. That sounds a lot like Cage’s recent masterpiece Pig, and some reviewers have compared it to the Aussie New Wave classic Wake in Fright, making The Surfer one of the more compelling entries on this list.
Friendship
May 9
Speaking of internet faves, Friendship stars Tim Robinson as a bored suburbanite who makes fast friends with a new neighbor played by Paul Rudd. Feeling that the bond has restored his lost youth, Robinson’s character soon becomes an obsessive and even destructive force in his neighbor’s life while alienating himself from his wife (Kate Mara).
To anyone familiar with I Think You Should Leave, that description fills the mind with images of slicked back hair and sloppy steaks, which should both excite and worry us. Robinson’s humor works great in five-minute sketches, but will that translate to feature length? Fortunately, Robinson and Rudd have Our Flag Means Death and PEN15‘s Andrew DeYoung onboard to direct.
Final Destination: Bloodlines
May 16
TheFinal Destination franchise has tried to close itself out twice, first with 2009’s awful The Final Destination and again in 2011’s excellent Final Destination 5. But Death’s work is never complete, so it’s fitting that a new entry would appear with Final Destination: Bloodlines.
To be honest, Bloodlines has some stiff competition, not only because it comes more than a decade after the last and best entry, but also because Oz Perkins already gave us a glorious pseudo-Destination this year with The Monkey. Directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein don’t exactly build the most confidence, as they won acclaim for their work on Disney XD shows. But Bloodlines does give us one last look at the late, great Tony Todd as mortician William Bludsworth, so we will be there on day one.
Hurry Up Tomorrow
May 14
On the heels of Smile 2 and Opus comes another horror movie about the plight of being an internationally beloved pop star. Based on his own album, Hurry Up Tomorrow stars Abel Tesfaye, aka The Weeknd, as a fictionalized version of himself who suffers a paranoid breakdown.
For those who only know The Weeknd from gifs, Hurry Up Tomorrow also stars Jenna Ortega as the pop star’s girlfriend and Barry Keoghan as a mysterious stranger. For cinephiles, the most compelling name on the poster is that of Trey Edward Shults, who broke out with the world’s scariest Thanksgiving movie Krisha and then followed it up with highly divisive movies It Comes at Night and Waves. Judging by Hurry Up Tomorrow‘s trailer, Shults has no intention of becoming predictable now.
Lilo & Stitch
May 23
Having already desecrated its classic and renaissance era in order to mine for ugly remakes that can be shoved into theaters, Disney turns to its oddball post-renaissance period for its latest live-action rehash. Are they remaking Brother Bear or Home on the Range, bad movies that might be improved by a second draft? Of course not! They’re remaking the good ones because those have name recognition!
Lilo & Stitch seems to repeat the exact same beats of the 2002 movie in which a fuzzy but dangerous alien (Chris Sanders) crash lands on Hawaii and befriends a lonely orphaned girl (Maia Kealoha) and her guardian big sister (Sydney Agudong). The one sliver of hope comes in the fact that Lilo & Stitch 2025 is directed by Dean Fleischer Camp, who made the delightful Marcel the Shell With Shoes On. Then again, if Camp is successful and Lilo & Stitch does well, then we’re bound to see live-action version of The Emperor’s New Groove, and no one wants that.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
May 23
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoningpromises to do what Owen Davian, Solomon Lane, and Jim Phelps could never accomplish: It will bring a stop to Ethan Hunt. Maybe. Through sure force of will and madness, Tom Cruise has transformed the Mission: Impossible franchise from a TV series best known for its theme song into a big-budget stunt spectacular in which we flock to see him risk his life for our amusement. But time comes even for Cruise, so Final Reckoning is being marketed as Hunt’s last outing.
At least he’s going out with a bang. Once again directed by Christopher McQuarrie, The Final Reckoning reveals the mastermind behind the rogue AI known as the Entity as someone with ties to the first film. Along the way, he’ll get help from his team, including mainstays played by Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg, as well as newer additions played by Hayley Atwell, Vanessa Kirby, and Pom Klementieff. Also, Tom Cruise will hang off a plane, which is what we’re really here to see.
Fear Street: Prom Queen
May 23
If you’re over the age of 25, you may only know Fear Street as the YA novels written by Goosebumps author R.L. Stein. However, the three Fear Street movies released by Netflix have been horror favorites of Gen Z, thanks to viral videos shared online. Fear Street: Prom Queen breaks from the trilogy format of the first three movies for a standalone story about scary things occurring at a 1988 prom queen race. Matt Palmer steps in for departing director Leigh Janiak, but as long as he can bring the gory thrills, Zoomers are sure to love it.
Fountain of Youth
May 23
English director Guy Ritchie continues to broaden his offerings with the adventure tale Fountain of Youth. Penned by veteran screenwriter James Vanderbilt (Zodiac, The Amazing Spider-Man), Fountain of Youth stars John Krasinski and Natalie Portman as siblings searching for the titular water source. They’re joined by a gaggle of character actors like Domhnall Gleeson, Eiza Gonzalez, and Stanley Tucci. That all sounds like a throwback good time to at least the heyday of National Treasure and Tomb Raider if not Indiana Jones. But one has to wonder if Fountain of Youth will be hampered by the fact that it’s straight to Apple TV+, dulling the sense of scale that adventure tales usually need.
Karate Kid: Legends
May 30
Karate Kid: Legends offers a rarity even in this age of IP-first filmmaking, a legacy sequel combined with a remake. Legends sees original Karate Kid Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) team with Kung Fu master Mr. Han (Jackie Chan) of the 2010 remake to train newcomer Li Fong (Ben Wang).
It’s a strange maneuver on Sony’s part, pivoting away from the very popular Karate Kid legacy series Cobra Kai, which recently ended its six season run on Netflix, and toward the lesser-loved 2010 remake. Will Legends uncover a hidden trove of fans nostalgic for the 2010 movie? Or is it time to finally bring back Hilary Swank from The Next Karate Kid? We’ll find out this summer.
The Phoenician Scheme
May 30, June 6 (wide)
Although initially panned upon its release in 2005, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou has been reclaimed as on of Wes Anderson‘s best movies (including by us!). So it’s good to see Anderson take another swing at the action genre with The Phoenician Scheme.
That said, The Phoenician Scheme does feel slightly different from most of Anderson’s movies, mostly because he’s shaking up his usual stable of players. Benicio del Toro, who had only previously worked with Anderson on The French Dispatch, takes the lead as businessman Zsa-zsa Korda, alongside new additions Mia Threapleton, Michael Cera, and Riz Ahmed. Of course familiar faces Tom Hanks, Bill Murray, and Scarlett Johansson are on hand, as is Anderson’s impeccable aesthetic.
Bring Her Back
May 30
Aussie twins Danny and Michael Philippou made the jump from YouTube to indie cult status with 2022’s Talk To Me. They’re ready to ride that momentum with their follow-up Bring Her Back, once again distributed by A24. Bring Her Back follows a recently orphaned brother and sister who come to the home of a foster mother played by Sally Hawkins, who already cares for a troubled boy who may have mystical powers. Judging by Bring Her Back‘s trailer, the Philippou brothers plan a movie just as troubling and intense as their debut.
From the World of John Wick: Ballerina
June 6
John Wick: Chapter 4 seemed to bring an end to the Baba Yaga, but you can’t keep a financially successful franchise down. Thus comes Ana de Armas in From the World of John Wick: Ballerina, complete with an appropriately ostentatious title. Even if you don’t think the John Wick series needed a movie that isn’t about John Wick, Ballerina has a few things in its favor. First, the movie sees the return of not just Reeves’ titular killer (this film is a side-quel set simultaneously during the events of Chapter 3 and 4), but also Ian McShane as Winston and Lance Reddick in his final performance as Charon. The “directed by” credit for Len Wiseman doesn’t inspire much hope, but behind-the-scenes reports indicate that original series director Chad Stahelski shot some of the fight scenes and spearheaded the reshoots. So maybe Ballerina‘s worth checking out after all.
The Life of Chuck
June 6
For the past few years, Mike Flanagan has established himself as one of the most interesting television creators working today. Although his last movie Doctor Sleep has its fans, supporters explicitly cite the Director’s Cut as the preferred version, arguing that the extended run time better suits the dazzling monologues Flanagan writes.
So we greet Flanagan’s return to the big screen with a bit of trepidation. Yes, he’s adapting Stephen King once again, and yes, he has most of his familiar ensemble in tow, including Kate Siegel, Rahul Kohli, Mark Hamill, and Carl Lumbly, alongside Tom Hiddleston stepping out of the MCU for a minute. But The Life of Chuck clocks in at under two hours, which seems like far too little time for these brilliant actors to deliver Flanagan’s lines about fate, faith, and the meaning of life. However, the buzz the film has generated out of TIFF, where it won the audience award and threw Oscar prognosticators’ end-of-year predictions into chaos (since this is a June 2025 release) fills us with curiosity.
How to Train Your Dragon (June 13)
The live-action Disney remakes can at least claim that they’re reimagining beloved classics. Great as the original How to Train Your Dragon, it’s only 15 years old. Worse, the remake seems to be using the exact same plot, the exact same CG designs of the dragons, and even the exact same Gerard Butler to play grumpy father Stoick the Vast. Why so many similarities? Because the remake is directed by the same guy who dreamed up the original, Dean DeBlois.
Still, maybe there’s some magic to be found in the new cast, which includes The Black Phone‘s Mason Thames as Hiccup and The Last of Us‘s Nico Parker as Astrid. If they can provide just enough energy, and if DeBlois can recapture some of the original’s magic he brought to the animated trilogy, then How to Train Your Dragon might stand on its own.
Materialists
June 13
Materialists may not be getting the same push as the summer’s superhero and remake entries, but it’s easily one of the more exciting movies coming soon. First, there’s the buzzy cast, including Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal, and Chris Evans. Then there’s the director Celine Song, making her follow-up to 2023’s Past Lives. Finally, there’s the design of the poster, which finds the central trio doing catalogue poses in an image surrounded by a thick white border.
Everything about Materialists recalls the adult romantic comedies of the ’80s and ’90s, especially its plot. Johnson plays a high-powered matchmaker who, against her better judgment, gets caught in a triangle. If it has even an ounce of the verve of Broadcast News and half the humanity of Past Lives, Materialists will be a favorite long after summer’s end.
Echo Valley
June 13
Speaking of big names in a low-stakes picture, Mare of Eastown creator Brad Ingelsby returns to the features with Echo Valley for Apple TV+. Julianne Moore and Sydney Sweeney play a mother and daughter who reunite after a tragedy. Sweeney may have broken out with the flashy series Euphoria, but Echo Valley may be another chance to show off the acting chops witnessed in Reality. As seen in his scripts for Mare of Eastown, The Way Back, and Out of the Furnace, Ingelsby understands the nuances of small town life, giving Sweeney plenty of room to develop a complex character.
28 Years Later
June 20
It’s only been 23 years since director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland un-nevered the world with their zombie thriller 28 Days Later, but we’re willing the fudge the math to get the pair together again. As its title suggests, 28 Years Later takes place more than a quarter century after a rage virus ravaged England. Despite the new status quo, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his son Spike (Alfie Williams) must leave their island village to face the monsters.
Back in 2002, before George Romero’s return to the genre and all of The Walking Dead, zombies felt fresh and digital photography seemed innovative. Both the technology and the genre have lost some of their bite today. but if there’s anyone who can reanimate the dead forms, it’s Boyle and Garland. We’ll see if 28 Years Later proves worth the wait.
Elio
June 20
Even though Pixar isn’t the surefire studio it once was, a new release still deserves our attention, especially when the trio of directors includes Turning Red‘s Domee Shi and Coco‘s Adrian Molina. Both helmers of two of the best recent Pixar movies, Shi and Molina are joined by Madeline Sharafian, making her feature debut.
Elio follows the titular outer-space nerd (Yonas Kibreab) as he’s somehow selected o represent humanity in an intergalactic council. If all goes well, Elio will learn about life while going through some wacky hijinks, and kids and adults alike will be moved to tears.
M3GAN 2.0
June 27
You can’t keep a viral sensation down, so it’s no surprise to see Blumhouse‘s pre-teen murder-bot make her return for M3GAN 2.0. Taking a page out of the Terminator 2 handbook, M3GAN 2.0 sees the reconstituted robot (voiced by Jenna Davis and performed by Amie Donald) doing battle with an upgraded successor called Amelia (Ivanna Sakhno).
Allison Williams is back as M3GAN’s inventor as is Violet McGraw as her charge/victim. James Wan produces again, as does original co-writer Akela Cooper and director Gerard Johnstone scripting. The question is whether this one will be as heavy on the meme-ready action?
F1
June 27
Most movie fans point to baseball and boxing as the most cinematic of sports, but racing is a pretty close third. So the prospect of seeing Brad Pitt drive fast cars is enough to get butts in seats for F1, especially with direction by Joseph Kosinski of Tron: Legacy and Top Gun: Maverick.
F1 has a well-worn sports plot, with Pitt playing a driver whose career ended with a crash decades ago but is now brought back to mentor a promising up-and-comer (Damson Idris). But racing’s all about improvisations within a set track, and if Kosinski can shoot cars like he shot fighter jets, then no one will care about familiar plot beats.
Jurassic World: Rebirth
July 2
Perhaps the greatest testament to the power of the original Jurassic Park is how Steven Spielberg‘s movie still inspires wonder no matter how many lackluster sequels follow. That said, Jurassic World: Rebirth does have a harder road to hoe, given that it comes off of the dismal Jurassic World Dominion(aka, the one with more locusts than dinosaurs).
Rebirth hopes to correct course by going back to the original. Not only is the trailer full of callbacks to the first movie, but it even boasts a script by David Koepp, screenwriter of the 1993 film. Furthermore, Rebirth director Gareth Edwards (Godzilla, Rogue One) seems to be aiming for old-school adventure in which a scientist (Jonathan Bailey) hires two mercenaries (Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali) to help him find dino genetics that could lead to pharmaceutical breakthroughs. Not exactly cutting edge in plot, but, honestly, as long as Jurassic World: Rebirth has cool dinos eating some folks in cool ways, we’ll be there.
The Old Guard 2
July 2
It’s been five years since Netflix released The Old Guard, an excellent fantasy action film based on the comic book by Greg Rucka and Leandro Fernández. In the passing years, The Old Guard hasn’t quite become the cult sensation that it deserves to be, but the story is worthy of continuing, especially if new director Victoria Mahoney can match the mixture of action and character depth established by her predecessor Gina Prince-Bythewood.
The Old Guard 2 brings back Charlize Theron as Andromache of Scythia, aka Andy, the leader of a group of near-immortals who travel the world doing good. She’s joined by newest recruit Nile Freeman (KiKi Layne) and her reliable teammates, all of whom she’ll need to counter a vengeful former lover (Vân Veronica Ngô), who spent the past centuries trapped in an underwater grave.
Superman
July 11
This late in the cycle of superhero movies, we all believe a man can fly. What remains an open questions is if Warner Bros. can make a Superman film as inspirational as the 1978 classic with that tagline in 2025. Hiring true genre aficanado James Gunn seemed like a great start, but can the guy who cut his teeth with Troma, and gleefully slaughtered Z-listers in The Suicide Squad, be the one to pull it off?
Yet with each new look at Superman, our belief grows. Rachel Brosnahan is pitch-perfect casting for Lois Lane and David Corenswet seems to embody the Clark Kent/Superman divide. After The Great and The Menu, Nicholas Hoult has become the ideal person to play the megalomaniacal Lex Luthor. Throw in a compelling supporting cast with inspired choices, including Nathan Fillion as Guy Gardner and Skyler Gisondo as Jimmy Olsen, and its getting easier to believe every minute.
I Know What You Did Last Summer
July 18
As the Scream franchise burns up the goodwill its relaunch earned with a series of unforced errors, its kid sister rises to take its place. The 2025 version of I Know What You Did Last Summer follows a group of attractive young people who get chased around a seaside town by a killer fisherman with a hook hand, all penance for some secret crime committed the previous year… just like in the 1997 film.
To its credit, the I Know What You Did Last Summer 2025 seems to recognize the improbability of its premise and leans into it. The trailer not only highlights the pretty new set of victims, led by Glass Onion’s Madelyn Cline, but also originals Freddie Prinze Jr. and Jennifer Love Hewitt, both of whom deliver some self-aware dialogue. If director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson (Do Revenge) can nail the balance of metatextual references and nasty slasher kills, Scream may indeed become the stuff of forgotten summers.
Eddington
July 18
Ari Aster made his name by shocking viewers: first with the deeply unsettling Hereditary and then with the still-beguiling Midsommar, which drove people back to his inexplicable short films, before completely baffling everyone with his comic odyssey Beau Is Afraid.
All of that’s a long way of saying that we have no idea what to expect from his latest entry, Eddington. A teaser trailer suggests that Aster’s taking a more satirical edge, as it shows a man played by Joaquin Phoenix scrolling to his phone to see ripped-from-the-headlines videos about COVID, public shaming, and MAGA protests, and here performed by actors as adored as Pedro Pascal and Emma Stone. But that sounds way too easy for a filmmaker like Aster, so prepare for Eddington to shock you in ways you could never foresee.
The Fantastic Four: First Steps
July 25
Together with Superman, The Fantastic Four: First Steps seeks to revitalize the superhero movie genre with a dose of bright-eyed optimism. And like its cousin over at the Distinguished Competition side of the street, First Steps has to cleanse public memory of some pretty terrible predecessors. It’s taking the right steps with its cast, which includes favorites Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach as the central quartet.
Adding to the appeal is the retro-futuristic aesthetic, brought to life by WandaVision’s Matt Shakman. However, that does raise questions about First Steps’ placement in the larger Marvel Universe. Will the world-devourer Galactus (Ralph Ineson) and his herald Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) destroy this world, immediately tarnishing Marvel’s brightly-hued new entries? We’ll have to wait for the post-credits to know for sure.
Happy Gilmore 2
July 25
Forget I Know What You Did Last Summer. 2025’s most surprising ‘90s come back belongs to hockey player-turned-golfer Happy Gilmore who comes to Netflix with a sequel 29 years in the making. Adam Sandler reteams with original writer Tim Herlihy for the latest in Happy’s shenanigans.
Happy Gilmore 2 finds Happy returning to the green for some reason. But let’s be honest, the reason doesn’t matter. Adam Sandler movies are mostly about watching him have fun with his friends, and that’s exactly what Happy Gilmore 2 promises, complete with appearances by Julie Bowen, Christopher McDonald, and Ben Stiller, all reprising their characters from the first movie, along with lots of golfer cameos.
The Bad Guys 2
August 1
Based on the popular line of children’s illustrated novels, The Bad Guys stars Sam Rockwell as Mr. Wolf, the leader of a group of carnivores/criminals who seek to rehabilitate their image. Thanks to its solid voice acting from Rockwell and co-stars, including Marc Maron and Awkwafina, and its use of the animation techniques pioneered by Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, The Bad Guys was a surprise hit in 2022.
The sequel hopes to continue that success, bringing back all of the principle cast, director Pierre Perifel, and the same animation engine. Following the “bigger is better” approach to sequels, The Bad Guys 2 introduces the Bad Girls, lady animals voiced by the likes of Danielle Brooks and Natasha Lyonne. As long as it can provide the zany energy that kids liked about the first film, The Bad Guys are sure to do good once again at the box office.
The Naked Gun
August 1
On paper the long-in-development remake of The Naked Gun sounds like a disaster. Who today has the same dry humor of the late, great Leslie Nielsen? Who has the same eye for parodic detail as the Zucker Brothers and Jim Abrams? Heck, does our current world of non-stop police procedurals have anything like M Squad, the forgotten show that inspired The Naked Gun’s predecessor, Police Squad?
Most of those concerns fall away when we see the first teaser for The Naked Gun 2025. Directed by the Lonely Island’s Akiva Schaffer, The Naked Gun has an inspired pick in Liam Neeson as Frank Drebin Jr., leader of a new version of Police Squad, and he’s joined by Paul Walter Hauser as Ed Hocken Jr. and Moses Jones as Nordberg Jr. Just reading that sentence boosts confidence that, somehow, Schaffer and company have figured out how to replicate the ZAZ humor for today’s audiences.
Freakier Friday
August 8
The train of long-in-the-making sequels continues with Freakier Friday, a continuation of the 2003 Disney remake with Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan. In the 2003 version, mother and daughter Tess and Anna Coleman swapped bodies, leading to good-hearted shenanigans and family bonding. The sequel doubles up with a four-way swap, bringing a daughter and step-daughter (Julia Butters and Sophia Hammons, respectively) into the mix.
Judging by the trailer, director Nisha Ganatra (Late Night, The High Note) knows exactly what fans expect from this outing and plans to give it to them. A game Curtis and Lohan throw themselves into their age-inappropriate roles and the quadruple swap changes things up just enough. Throw familiar faces such as Chad Michael Murray and Rosalind Chao from the first movie and add Manny Jacinto as a new love interest, and Freakier Friday’s set to be a warm reunion for 2000s kids ready for some nostalgia.
Weapons
August 8
Weapons director Zach Cregger isn’t a new name, having performed for years in the sketch group The Whitest Kids U’ Know and even co-directed Miss March with late co-star Trevor Moore. But Cregger proved we didn’t really know him at all with his solo director debut, the 2022 shocker Barbarian.
Weapons seeks to surprise us all over again, beginning with a cryptic ad campaign of blurry surveillance footage. Weapons presents itself as a missing persons story, dealing with the mass exodus of children from a suburban neighborhood. But if Barbarian is any indication, that premise just starts the upsetting story that Cregger wants to tell.
Nobody 2
August 15
No one watching Mr. Show in its heyday could have predicted that Bob Odenkirk would have gone from guy who shouts obscenities in sketch comedies to beloved dad who warmly greets his little women. Even more shocking was Odenkirk’s turn to action hero in 2021’s Nobody, in which he played a put-upon suburbanite who recovers his international assassin skills after an attack on his family. If that sounds similar to John Wick, well, it is written by Derek Kolstad, who co-created the Keanu Reeves character.
Nobody 2 picks up where the first movie left off, with Odenkirk’s Hutch Mansell and his FBI agent father David (Christopher Lloyd) trying to return to their old lives after the latter’s night of chaos. This time around, Kolstad shares a writing credit with three others (including Odenkirk), but Timo Tjahjanto (who co-directed the “Safe Haven” segment of V/H/S/ 2 with Gareth Evans) steps into direct.
Eden
August 22
By this point, you know what to expect from a Ron Howard movie: something that’s solidly well-made or—occasionally—a project that unintentionally unleashes nightmares upon the country, as with 2020’s Hillbilly Elegy. We’re hoping for more of the former with Eden, starring Jude Law, Vanessa Kirby, Ana de Armas, and Sydney Sweeney.
Based on a true story, Eden follows two German scientists (Law and Kirby) as they flee their home country in 1929 to settle on Floreana Island in the Galápagos. Soon others follow, creating trouble in their apparent paradise. Will the story of Europeans colonizing Latin American land provide entertainment in the year 2025 or will Howard’s style of middlebrow blockbusters be rejected by modern audiences? We’ll see soon enough.
Caught Stealing
August 29
Darren Aronofsky movies aren’t always good, but they are always interesting, so we can’t help but look with anticipation toward Caught Stealing. Working from a script by author Charlie Huston, Caught Stealing stars Austin Butler as a baseball player who descends into the criminal underworld of 1990s New York. While he’s made some out-there fantasias such as The Fountain and mother!, Aronofsky’s biggest hits tend to be gritty tales such as Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan, and The Wrestler. Huston’s writing seems to tend toward the more realistic side with hints of surrealism, which suits Aronofsky’s style just fine.
The Toxic Avenger
August 29
Video store kids of the ‘80s and ‘90s all know about Toxie, the breakout hero and mascot of Troma Entertainment. Does that name mean anything today? After all, Troma is very much a product of the VHS era when the demand for home video made a reliable market for their low-budget movies, designed to nothing more than offend moral and aesthetic taste. The Toxic Avenger from 1984 brought Troma and Toxie to the masses, but when kids today have instant access to the worst humanity has to offer, what can Troma do?
We’ll find out when the remake of The Toxic Avenger finally hits theaters this summer. Originally debuting at Fantastic Fest in 2023, The Toxic Avenger stars Peter Dinklage as janitor Winston Gooze, transformed into the titular anti-hero after a bullying accident. But the most promising part of this update is behind the camera, as actor Macon Blair, a regular of Jeremy Saulnier’s troupe and the director of I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore, writes and directs.
The Roses
August 29
Closing out a summer full of surprising sequels and remakes is the most unlikely of them all. Directed by Jay Roach and written by Tony McNamara, The Roses is based on the 1981 novel The War of the Roses by Warren Adler, which was previously adapted into a 1989 movie starring Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner, and Danny DeVito. In this version, Olivia Coleman and Benedict Cumberbatch play a successful, upper-class couple who turn destructive as they head toward divorce.
Unlike some others on this list, The Roses feels like exactly the type of movie that needs a refresh in 2025. Movies for adults have taken a backseat to the big-budget PG-13 fair of the past two decades, and we’re worse off for it. A comedy about grown ups, even grown up behaving like children, might be exactly the palate cleanser we need as we head into the awards-friendly autumn.
This article contains spoilers for Andor season 2 episodes 4-6. We’re already halfway through the final season of Andor, and with it, there are just two in-universe years left until showrunner Tony Gilroy drags us into the tragic events of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. As we fill in the gaps about what some […]
For some people, the summer months mean beaches and long days outdoors. For Den of Geek readers, the summer means staying inside air conditioned movie theaters and watching big budget spectacles! And boy, does summer 2025 have spectacles. But if superheroes and dinosaurs aren’t your bag, you don’t have to skip cinemas altogether this season. Everything from comedy revivals to existential horrors will be hitting screens over the next couple of months, promising cool entertainment for all. And we got it all here for your viewing pleasure.
Paul Feig continues to be one of the more mercurial figures in Hollywood. He’s directed or co-created some excellent stuff, including Freaks & Geeks, Spy, and the deeply underrated Last Christmas. But he’s also behind absolute stinkers such as The Heat and Jackpot!, making for a checkered filmography.
This year, Feig returns to one of his more successful projects with the sequel Another Simple Favor. Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick reprise their roles as the stylish, suspicious rivals Emily Nelson and Stephanie Smothers. This time, the murder that binds them occurs in Capri, Italy, promising even more magazine-spread sophistication than the first movie.
Thunderbolts*
May 2
Who can say what kind of movie Thunderbolts* will be? It follows Captain America: Brave New World, a movie that seemed to embarrass even Marvel, and precedes the highly-anticipated The Fantastic Four: First Steps. Throw in a delayed production process that lost Steven Yeun and Ayo Edebiri, replaced by Lewis Pullman and Geraldine Viswanathan, and the tea leaves might be ambiguous.
But maybe that misfit status will work in the film’s favor. Thunderbolts* walks the same path as Suicide Squad and this year’s Star Trek: Section 31 as a story about people who don’t belong together forming a team. Unlike those dismal films, however, Thunderbolts* seems to understand its ragtag place, with marketing leaning heavily on the mountains of charisma that Florence Pugh and David Harbour bring, alongside Sebastian Stan’s beloved Winter Soldier.
The Surfer
May 2
By this point, Nicolas Cage has completed his purgation from being ironically loved by the internet to actually loved by the internet, to finally recognized (again) as one of the most interesting working actors in cinema. So even the the ad campaign for The Surfer has been as spartan as its title, we can’t help but be intrigued.
Directed by Irish filmmaker Lorcan Finnegan (Vivarium, Nocebo) and written by Thomas Martin, The Surfer features Cage as a man who brings his son to surf an Australian beach he loved in his youth only to be menaced by local roughs. That sounds a lot like Cage’s recent masterpiece Pig, and some reviewers have compared it to the Aussie New Wave classic Wake in Fright, making The Surfer one of the more compelling entries on this list.
Friendship
May 9
Speaking of internet faves, Friendship stars Tim Robinson as a bored suburbanite who makes fast friends with a new neighbor played by Paul Rudd. Feeling that the bond has restored his lost youth, Robinson’s character soon becomes an obsessive and even destructive force in his neighbor’s life while alienating himself from his wife (Kate Mara).
To anyone familiar with I Think You Should Leave, that description fills the mind with images of slicked back hair and sloppy steaks, which should both excite and worry us. Robinson’s humor works great in five-minute sketches, but will that translate to feature length? Fortunately, Robinson and Rudd have Our Flag Means Death and PEN15‘s Andrew DeYoung onboard to direct.
Final Destination: Bloodlines
May 16
TheFinal Destination franchise has tried to close itself out twice, first with 2009’s awful The Final Destination and again in 2011’s excellent Final Destination 5. But Death’s work is never complete, so it’s fitting that a new entry would appear with Final Destination: Bloodlines.
To be honest, Bloodlines has some stiff competition, not only because it comes more than a decade after the last and best entry, but also because Oz Perkins already gave us a glorious pseudo-Destination this year with The Monkey. Directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein don’t exactly build the most confidence, as they won acclaim for their work on Disney XD shows. But Bloodlines does give us one last look at the late, great Tony Todd as mortician William Bludsworth, so we will be there on day one.
Hurry Up Tomorrow
May 14
On the heels of Smile 2 and Opus comes another horror movie about the plight of being an internationally beloved pop star. Based on his own album, Hurry Up Tomorrow stars Abel Tesfaye, aka The Weeknd, as a fictionalized version of himself who suffers a paranoid breakdown.
For those who only know The Weeknd from gifs, Hurry Up Tomorrow also stars Jenna Ortega as the pop star’s girlfriend and Barry Keoghan as a mysterious stranger. For cinephiles, the most compelling name on the poster is that of Trey Edward Shults, who broke out with the world’s scariest Thanksgiving movie Krisha and then followed it up with highly divisive movies It Comes at Night and Waves. Judging by Hurry Up Tomorrow‘s trailer, Shults has no intention of becoming predictable now.
Lilo & Stitch
May 23
Having already desecrated its classic and renaissance era in order to mine for ugly remakes that can be shoved into theaters, Disney turns to its oddball post-renaissance period for its latest live-action rehash. Are they remaking Brother Bear or Home on the Range, bad movies that might be improved by a second draft? Of course not! They’re remaking the good ones because those have name recognition!
Lilo & Stitch seems to repeat the exact same beats of the 2002 movie in which a fuzzy but dangerous alien (Chris Sanders) crash lands on Hawaii and befriends a lonely orphaned girl (Maia Kealoha) and her guardian big sister (Sydney Agudong). The one sliver of hope comes in the fact that Lilo & Stitch 2025 is directed by Dean Fleischer Camp, who made the delightful Marcel the Shell With Shoes On. Then again, if Camp is successful and Lilo & Stitch does well, then we’re bound to see live-action version of The Emperor’s New Groove, and no one wants that.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
May 23
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoningpromises to do what Owen Davian, Solomon Lane, and Jim Phelps could never accomplish: It will bring a stop to Ethan Hunt. Maybe. Through sure force of will and madness, Tom Cruise has transformed the Mission: Impossible franchise from a TV series best known for its theme song into a big-budget stunt spectacular in which we flock to see him risk his life for our amusement. But time comes even for Cruise, so Final Reckoning is being marketed as Hunt’s last outing.
At least he’s going out with a bang. Once again directed by Christopher McQuarrie, The Final Reckoning reveals the mastermind behind the rogue AI known as the Entity as someone with ties to the first film. Along the way, he’ll get help from his team, including mainstays played by Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg, as well as newer additions played by Hayley Atwell, Vanessa Kirby, and Pom Klementieff. Also, Tom Cruise will hang off a plane, which is what we’re really here to see.
Fear Street: Prom Queen
May 23
If you’re over the age of 25, you may only know Fear Street as the YA novels written by Goosebumps author R.L. Stein. However, the three Fear Street movies released by Netflix have been horror favorites of Gen Z, thanks to viral videos shared online. Fear Street: Prom Queen breaks from the trilogy format of the first three movies for a standalone story about scary things occurring at a 1988 prom queen race. Matt Palmer steps in for departing director Leigh Janiak, but as long as he can bring the gory thrills, Zoomers are sure to love it.
Fountain of Youth
May 23
English director Guy Ritchie continues to broaden his offerings with the adventure tale Fountain of Youth. Penned by veteran screenwriter James Vanderbilt (Zodiac, The Amazing Spider-Man), Fountain of Youth stars John Krasinski and Natalie Portman as siblings searching for the titular water source. They’re joined by a gaggle of character actors like Domhnall Gleeson, Eiza Gonzalez, and Stanley Tucci. That all sounds like a throwback good time to at least the heyday of National Treasure and Tomb Raider if not Indiana Jones. But one has to wonder if Fountain of Youth will be hampered by the fact that it’s straight to Apple TV+, dulling the sense of scale that adventure tales usually need.
Karate Kid: Legends
May 30
Karate Kid: Legends offers a rarity even in this age of IP-first filmmaking, a legacy sequel combined with a remake. Legends sees original Karate Kid Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) team with Kung Fu master Mr. Han (Jackie Chan) of the 2010 remake to train newcomer Li Fong (Ben Wang).
It’s a strange maneuver on Sony’s part, pivoting away from the very popular Karate Kid legacy series Cobra Kai, which recently ended its six season run on Netflix, and toward the lesser-loved 2010 remake. Will Legends uncover a hidden trove of fans nostalgic for the 2010 movie? Or is it time to finally bring back Hilary Swank from The Next Karate Kid? We’ll find out this summer.
The Phoenician Scheme
May 30, June 6 (wide)
Although initially panned upon its release in 2005, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou has been reclaimed as on of Wes Anderson‘s best movies (including by us!). So it’s good to see Anderson take another swing at the action genre with The Phoenician Scheme.
That said, The Phoenician Scheme does feel slightly different from most of Anderson’s movies, mostly because he’s shaking up his usual stable of players. Benicio del Toro, who had only previously worked with Anderson on The French Dispatch, takes the lead as businessman Zsa-zsa Korda, alongside new additions Mia Threapleton, Michael Cera, and Riz Ahmed. Of course familiar faces Tom Hanks, Bill Murray, and Scarlett Johansson are on hand, as is Anderson’s impeccable aesthetic.
Bring Her Back
May 30
Aussie twins Danny and Michael Philippou made the jump from YouTube to indie cult status with 2022’s Talk To Me. They’re ready to ride that momentum with their follow-up Bring Her Back, once again distributed by A24. Bring Her Back follows a recently orphaned brother and sister who come to the home of a foster mother played by Sally Hawkins, who already cares for a troubled boy who may have mystical powers. Judging by Bring Her Back‘s trailer, the Philippou brothers plan a movie just as troubling and intense as their debut.
From the World of John Wick: Ballerina
June 6
John Wick: Chapter 4 seemed to bring an end to the Baba Yaga, but you can’t keep a financially successful franchise down. Thus comes Ana de Armas in From the World of John Wick: Ballerina, complete with an appropriately ostentatious title. Even if you don’t think the John Wick series needed a movie that isn’t about John Wick, Ballerina has a few things in its favor. First, the movie sees the return of not just Reeves’ titular killer (this film is a side-quel set simultaneously during the events of Chapter 3 and 4), but also Ian McShane as Winston and Lance Reddick in his final performance as Charon. The “directed by” credit for Len Wiseman doesn’t inspire much hope, but behind-the-scenes reports indicate that original series director Chad Stahelski shot some of the fight scenes and spearheaded the reshoots. So maybe Ballerina‘s worth checking out after all.
The Life of Chuck
June 6
For the past few years, Mike Flanagan has established himself as one of the most interesting television creators working today. Although his last movie Doctor Sleep has its fans, supporters explicitly cite the Director’s Cut as the preferred version, arguing that the extended run time better suits the dazzling monologues Flanagan writes.
So we greet Flanagan’s return to the big screen with a bit of trepidation. Yes, he’s adapting Stephen King once again, and yes, he has most of his familiar ensemble in tow, including Kate Siegel, Rahul Kohli, Mark Hamill, and Carl Lumbly, alongside Tom Hiddleston stepping out of the MCU for a minute. But The Life of Chuck clocks in at under two hours, which seems like far too little time for these brilliant actors to deliver Flanagan’s lines about fate, faith, and the meaning of life. However, the buzz the film has generated out of TIFF, where it won the audience award and threw Oscar prognosticators’ end-of-year predictions into chaos (since this is a June 2025 release) fills us with curiosity.
How to Train Your Dragon (June 13)
The live-action Disney remakes can at least claim that they’re reimagining beloved classics. Great as the original How to Train Your Dragon, it’s only 15 years old. Worse, the remake seems to be using the exact same plot, the exact same CG designs of the dragons, and even the exact same Gerard Butler to play grumpy father Stoick the Vast. Why so many similarities? Because the remake is directed by the same guy who dreamed up the original, Dean DeBlois.
Still, maybe there’s some magic to be found in the new cast, which includes The Black Phone‘s Mason Thames as Hiccup and The Last of Us‘s Nico Parker as Astrid. If they can provide just enough energy, and if DeBlois can recapture some of the original’s magic he brought to the animated trilogy, then How to Train Your Dragon might stand on its own.
Materialists
June 13
Materialists may not be getting the same push as the summer’s superhero and remake entries, but it’s easily one of the more exciting movies coming soon. First, there’s the buzzy cast, including Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal, and Chris Evans. Then there’s the director Celine Song, making her follow-up to 2023’s Past Lives. Finally, there’s the design of the poster, which finds the central trio doing catalogue poses in an image surrounded by a thick white border.
Everything about Materialists recalls the adult romantic comedies of the ’80s and ’90s, especially its plot. Johnson plays a high-powered matchmaker who, against her better judgment, gets caught in a triangle. If it has even an ounce of the verve of Broadcast News and half the humanity of Past Lives, Materialists will be a favorite long after summer’s end.
Echo Valley
June 13
Speaking of big names in a low-stakes picture, Mare of Eastown creator Brad Ingelsby returns to the features with Echo Valley for Apple TV+. Julianne Moore and Sydney Sweeney play a mother and daughter who reunite after a tragedy. Sweeney may have broken out with the flashy series Euphoria, but Echo Valley may be another chance to show off the acting chops witnessed in Reality. As seen in his scripts for Mare of Eastown, The Way Back, and Out of the Furnace, Ingelsby understands the nuances of small town life, giving Sweeney plenty of room to develop a complex character.
28 Years Later
June 20
It’s only been 23 years since director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland un-nevered the world with their zombie thriller 28 Days Later, but we’re willing the fudge the math to get the pair together again. As its title suggests, 28 Years Later takes place more than a quarter century after a rage virus ravaged England. Despite the new status quo, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his son Spike (Alfie Williams) must leave their island village to face the monsters.
Back in 2002, before George Romero’s return to the genre and all of The Walking Dead, zombies felt fresh and digital photography seemed innovative. Both the technology and the genre have lost some of their bite today. but if there’s anyone who can reanimate the dead forms, it’s Boyle and Garland. We’ll see if 28 Years Later proves worth the wait.
Elio
June 20
Even though Pixar isn’t the surefire studio it once was, a new release still deserves our attention, especially when the trio of directors includes Turning Red‘s Domee Shi and Coco‘s Adrian Molina. Both helmers of two of the best recent Pixar movies, Shi and Molina are joined by Madeline Sharafian, making her feature debut.
Elio follows the titular outer-space nerd (Yonas Kibreab) as he’s somehow selected o represent humanity in an intergalactic council. If all goes well, Elio will learn about life while going through some wacky hijinks, and kids and adults alike will be moved to tears.
M3GAN 2.0
June 27
You can’t keep a viral sensation down, so it’s no surprise to see Blumhouse‘s pre-teen murder-bot make her return for M3GAN 2.0. Taking a page out of the Terminator 2 handbook, M3GAN 2.0 sees the reconstituted robot (voiced by Jenna Davis and performed by Amie Donald) doing battle with an upgraded successor called Amelia (Ivanna Sakhno).
Allison Williams is back as M3GAN’s inventor as is Violet McGraw as her charge/victim. James Wan produces again, as does original co-writer Akela Cooper and director Gerard Johnstone scripting. The question is whether this one will be as heavy on the meme-ready action?
F1
June 27
Most movie fans point to baseball and boxing as the most cinematic of sports, but racing is a pretty close third. So the prospect of seeing Brad Pitt drive fast cars is enough to get butts in seats for F1, especially with direction by Joseph Kosinski of Tron: Legacy and Top Gun: Maverick.
F1 has a well-worn sports plot, with Pitt playing a driver whose career ended with a crash decades ago but is now brought back to mentor a promising up-and-comer (Damson Idris). But racing’s all about improvisations within a set track, and if Kosinski can shoot cars like he shot fighter jets, then no one will care about familiar plot beats.
Jurassic World: Rebirth
July 2
Perhaps the greatest testament to the power of the original Jurassic Park is how Steven Spielberg‘s movie still inspires wonder no matter how many lackluster sequels follow. That said, Jurassic World: Rebirth does have a harder road to hoe, given that it comes off of the dismal Jurassic World Dominion(aka, the one with more locusts than dinosaurs).
Rebirth hopes to correct course by going back to the original. Not only is the trailer full of callbacks to the first movie, but it even boasts a script by David Koepp, screenwriter of the 1993 film. Furthermore, Rebirth director Gareth Edwards (Godzilla, Rogue One) seems to be aiming for old-school adventure in which a scientist (Jonathan Bailey) hires two mercenaries (Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali) to help him find dino genetics that could lead to pharmaceutical breakthroughs. Not exactly cutting edge in plot, but, honestly, as long as Jurassic World: Rebirth has cool dinos eating some folks in cool ways, we’ll be there.
The Old Guard 2
July 2
It’s been five years since Netflix released The Old Guard, an excellent fantasy action film based on the comic book by Greg Rucka and Leandro Fernández. In the passing years, The Old Guard hasn’t quite become the cult sensation that it deserves to be, but the story is worthy of continuing, especially if new director Victoria Mahoney can match the mixture of action and character depth established by her predecessor Gina Prince-Bythewood.
The Old Guard 2 brings back Charlize Theron as Andromache of Scythia, aka Andy, the leader of a group of near-immortals who travel the world doing good. She’s joined by newest recruit Nile Freeman (KiKi Layne) and her reliable teammates, all of whom she’ll need to counter a vengeful former lover (Vân Veronica Ngô), who spent the past centuries trapped in an underwater grave.
Superman
July 11
This late in the cycle of superhero movies, we all believe a man can fly. What remains an open questions is if Warner Bros. can make a Superman film as inspirational as the 1978 classic with that tagline in 2025. Hiring true genre aficanado James Gunn seemed like a great start, but can the guy who cut his teeth with Troma, and gleefully slaughtered Z-listers in The Suicide Squad, be the one to pull it off?
Yet with each new look at Superman, our belief grows. Rachel Brosnahan is pitch-perfect casting for Lois Lane and David Corenswet seems to embody the Clark Kent/Superman divide. After The Great and The Menu, Nicholas Hoult has become the ideal person to play the megalomaniacal Lex Luthor. Throw in a compelling supporting cast with inspired choices, including Nathan Fillion as Guy Gardner and Skyler Gisondo as Jimmy Olsen, and its getting easier to believe every minute.
I Know What You Did Last Summer
July 18
As the Scream franchise burns up the goodwill its relaunch earned with a series of unforced errors, its kid sister rises to take its place. The 2025 version of I Know What You Did Last Summer follows a group of attractive young people who get chased around a seaside town by a killer fisherman with a hook hand, all penance for some secret crime committed the previous year… just like in the 1997 film.
To its credit, the I Know What You Did Last Summer 2025 seems to recognize the improbability of its premise and leans into it. The trailer not only highlights the pretty new set of victims, led by Glass Onion’s Madelyn Cline, but also originals Freddie Prinze Jr. and Jennifer Love Hewitt, both of whom deliver some self-aware dialogue. If director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson (Do Revenge) can nail the balance of metatextual references and nasty slasher kills, Scream may indeed become the stuff of forgotten summers.
Eddington
July 18
Ari Aster made his name by shocking viewers: first with the deeply unsettling Hereditary and then with the still-beguiling Midsommar, which drove people back to his inexplicable short films, before completely baffling everyone with his comic odyssey Beau Is Afraid.
All of that’s a long way of saying that we have no idea what to expect from his latest entry, Eddington. A teaser trailer suggests that Aster’s taking a more satirical edge, as it shows a man played by Joaquin Phoenix scrolling to his phone to see ripped-from-the-headlines videos about COVID, public shaming, and MAGA protests, and here performed by actors as adored as Pedro Pascal and Emma Stone. But that sounds way too easy for a filmmaker like Aster, so prepare for Eddington to shock you in ways you could never foresee.
The Fantastic Four: First Steps
July 25
Together with Superman, The Fantastic Four: First Steps seeks to revitalize the superhero movie genre with a dose of bright-eyed optimism. And like its cousin over at the Distinguished Competition side of the street, First Steps has to cleanse public memory of some pretty terrible predecessors. It’s taking the right steps with its cast, which includes favorites Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach as the central quartet.
Adding to the appeal is the retro-futuristic aesthetic, brought to life by WandaVision’s Matt Shakman. However, that does raise questions about First Steps’ placement in the larger Marvel Universe. Will the world-devourer Galactus (Ralph Ineson) and his herald Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) destroy this world, immediately tarnishing Marvel’s brightly-hued new entries? We’ll have to wait for the post-credits to know for sure.
Happy Gilmore 2
July 25
Forget I Know What You Did Last Summer. 2025’s most surprising ‘90s come back belongs to hockey player-turned-golfer Happy Gilmore who comes to Netflix with a sequel 29 years in the making. Adam Sandler reteams with original writer Tim Herlihy for the latest in Happy’s shenanigans.
Happy Gilmore 2 finds Happy returning to the green for some reason. But let’s be honest, the reason doesn’t matter. Adam Sandler movies are mostly about watching him have fun with his friends, and that’s exactly what Happy Gilmore 2 promises, complete with appearances by Julie Bowen, Christopher McDonald, and Ben Stiller, all reprising their characters from the first movie, along with lots of golfer cameos.
The Bad Guys 2
August 1
Based on the popular line of children’s illustrated novels, The Bad Guys stars Sam Rockwell as Mr. Wolf, the leader of a group of carnivores/criminals who seek to rehabilitate their image. Thanks to its solid voice acting from Rockwell and co-stars, including Marc Maron and Awkwafina, and its use of the animation techniques pioneered by Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, The Bad Guys was a surprise hit in 2022.
The sequel hopes to continue that success, bringing back all of the principle cast, director Pierre Perifel, and the same animation engine. Following the “bigger is better” approach to sequels, The Bad Guys 2 introduces the Bad Girls, lady animals voiced by the likes of Danielle Brooks and Natasha Lyonne. As long as it can provide the zany energy that kids liked about the first film, The Bad Guys are sure to do good once again at the box office.
The Naked Gun
August 1
On paper the long-in-development remake of The Naked Gun sounds like a disaster. Who today has the same dry humor of the late, great Leslie Nielsen? Who has the same eye for parodic detail as the Zucker Brothers and Jim Abrams? Heck, does our current world of non-stop police procedurals have anything like M Squad, the forgotten show that inspired The Naked Gun’s predecessor, Police Squad?
Most of those concerns fall away when we see the first teaser for The Naked Gun 2025. Directed by the Lonely Island’s Akiva Schaffer, The Naked Gun has an inspired pick in Liam Neeson as Frank Drebin Jr., leader of a new version of Police Squad, and he’s joined by Paul Walter Hauser as Ed Hocken Jr. and Moses Jones as Nordberg Jr. Just reading that sentence boosts confidence that, somehow, Schaffer and company have figured out how to replicate the ZAZ humor for today’s audiences.
Freakier Friday
August 8
The train of long-in-the-making sequels continues with Freakier Friday, a continuation of the 2003 Disney remake with Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan. In the 2003 version, mother and daughter Tess and Anna Coleman swapped bodies, leading to good-hearted shenanigans and family bonding. The sequel doubles up with a four-way swap, bringing a daughter and step-daughter (Julia Butters and Sophia Hammons, respectively) into the mix.
Judging by the trailer, director Nisha Ganatra (Late Night, The High Note) knows exactly what fans expect from this outing and plans to give it to them. A game Curtis and Lohan throw themselves into their age-inappropriate roles and the quadruple swap changes things up just enough. Throw familiar faces such as Chad Michael Murray and Rosalind Chao from the first movie and add Manny Jacinto as a new love interest, and Freakier Friday’s set to be a warm reunion for 2000s kids ready for some nostalgia.
Weapons
August 8
Weapons director Zach Cregger isn’t a new name, having performed for years in the sketch group The Whitest Kids U’ Know and even co-directed Miss March with late co-star Trevor Moore. But Cregger proved we didn’t really know him at all with his solo director debut, the 2022 shocker Barbarian.
Weapons seeks to surprise us all over again, beginning with a cryptic ad campaign of blurry surveillance footage. Weapons presents itself as a missing persons story, dealing with the mass exodus of children from a suburban neighborhood. But if Barbarian is any indication, that premise just starts the upsetting story that Cregger wants to tell.
Nobody 2
August 15
No one watching Mr. Show in its heyday could have predicted that Bob Odenkirk would have gone from guy who shouts obscenities in sketch comedies to beloved dad who warmly greets his little women. Even more shocking was Odenkirk’s turn to action hero in 2021’s Nobody, in which he played a put-upon suburbanite who recovers his international assassin skills after an attack on his family. If that sounds similar to John Wick, well, it is written by Derek Kolstad, who co-created the Keanu Reeves character.
Nobody 2 picks up where the first movie left off, with Odenkirk’s Hutch Mansell and his FBI agent father David (Christopher Lloyd) trying to return to their old lives after the latter’s night of chaos. This time around, Kolstad shares a writing credit with three others (including Odenkirk), but Timo Tjahjanto (who co-directed the “Safe Haven” segment of V/H/S/ 2 with Gareth Evans) steps into direct.
Eden
August 22
By this point, you know what to expect from a Ron Howard movie: something that’s solidly well-made or—occasionally—a project that unintentionally unleashes nightmares upon the country, as with 2020’s Hillbilly Elegy. We’re hoping for more of the former with Eden, starring Jude Law, Vanessa Kirby, Ana de Armas, and Sydney Sweeney.
Based on a true story, Eden follows two German scientists (Law and Kirby) as they flee their home country in 1929 to settle on Floreana Island in the Galápagos. Soon others follow, creating trouble in their apparent paradise. Will the story of Europeans colonizing Latin American land provide entertainment in the year 2025 or will Howard’s style of middlebrow blockbusters be rejected by modern audiences? We’ll see soon enough.
Caught Stealing
August 29
Darren Aronofsky movies aren’t always good, but they are always interesting, so we can’t help but look with anticipation toward Caught Stealing. Working from a script by author Charlie Huston, Caught Stealing stars Austin Butler as a baseball player who descends into the criminal underworld of 1990s New York. While he’s made some out-there fantasias such as The Fountain and mother!, Aronofsky’s biggest hits tend to be gritty tales such as Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan, and The Wrestler. Huston’s writing seems to tend toward the more realistic side with hints of surrealism, which suits Aronofsky’s style just fine.
The Toxic Avenger
August 29
Video store kids of the ‘80s and ‘90s all know about Toxie, the breakout hero and mascot of Troma Entertainment. Does that name mean anything today? After all, Troma is very much a product of the VHS era when the demand for home video made a reliable market for their low-budget movies, designed to nothing more than offend moral and aesthetic taste. The Toxic Avenger from 1984 brought Troma and Toxie to the masses, but when kids today have instant access to the worst humanity has to offer, what can Troma do?
We’ll find out when the remake of The Toxic Avenger finally hits theaters this summer. Originally debuting at Fantastic Fest in 2023, The Toxic Avenger stars Peter Dinklage as janitor Winston Gooze, transformed into the titular anti-hero after a bullying accident. But the most promising part of this update is behind the camera, as actor Macon Blair, a regular of Jeremy Saulnier’s troupe and the director of I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore, writes and directs.
The Roses
August 29
Closing out a summer full of surprising sequels and remakes is the most unlikely of them all. Directed by Jay Roach and written by Tony McNamara, The Roses is based on the 1981 novel The War of the Roses by Warren Adler, which was previously adapted into a 1989 movie starring Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner, and Danny DeVito. In this version, Olivia Coleman and Benedict Cumberbatch play a successful, upper-class couple who turn destructive as they head toward divorce.
Unlike some others on this list, The Roses feels like exactly the type of movie that needs a refresh in 2025. Movies for adults have taken a backseat to the big-budget PG-13 fair of the past two decades, and we’re worse off for it. A comedy about grown ups, even grown up behaving like children, might be exactly the palate cleanser we need as we head into the awards-friendly autumn.
Are you like me, reading about people fading away as they burn out, and feeling unable to relate? Do you feel like your feelings are invisible to the world because you’re experiencing burnout differently? When burnout starts to push down on us, our core comes through more. Beautiful, peaceful souls get quieter and fade into that distant and distracted burnout we’ve all read about. But some of us, those with fires always burning on the edges of our core, get hotter. In my heart I am fire. When I face burnout I double down, triple down, burning hotter and hotter to try to best the challenge. I don’t fade—I am engulfed in a zealous burnout.
So what on earth is a zealous burnout?
Imagine a woman determined to do it all. She has two amazing children whom she, along with her husband who is also working remotely, is homeschooling during a pandemic. She has a demanding client load at work—all of whom she loves. She gets up early to get some movement in (or often catch up on work), does dinner prep as the kids are eating breakfast, and gets to work while positioning herself near “fourth grade” to listen in as she juggles clients, tasks, and budgets. Sound like a lot? Even with a supportive team both at home and at work, it is.
Sounds like this woman has too much on her plate and needs self-care. But no, she doesn’t have time for that. In fact, she starts to feel like she’s dropping balls. Not accomplishing enough. There’s not enough of her to be here and there; she is trying to divide her mind in two all the time, all day, every day. She starts to doubt herself. And as those feelings creep in more and more, her internal narrative becomes more and more critical.
Suddenly she KNOWS what she needs to do! She should DO MORE.
This is a hard and dangerous cycle. Know why? Because once she doesn’t finish that new goal, that narrative will get worse. Suddenly she’s failing. She isn’t doing enough. SHE is not enough. She might fail, she might fail her family…so she’ll find more she should do. She doesn’t sleep as much, move as much, all in the efforts to do more. Caught in this cycle of trying to prove herself to herself, never reaching any goal. Never feeling “enough.”
So, yeah, that’s what zealous burnout looks like for me. It doesn’t happen overnight in some grand gesture but instead slowly builds over weeks and months. My burning out process looks like speeding up, not a person losing focus. I speed up and up and up…and then I just stop.
I am the one who could
It’s funny the things that shape us. Through the lens of childhood, I viewed the fears, struggles, and sacrifices of someone who had to make it all work without having enough. I was lucky that my mother was so resourceful and my father supportive; I never went without and even got an extra here or there.
Growing up, I did not feel shame when my mother paid with food stamps; in fact, I’d have likely taken on any debate on the topic, verbally eviscerating anyone who dared to criticize the disabled woman trying to make sure all our needs were met with so little. As a child, I watched the way the fear of not making those ends meet impacted people I love. As the non-disabled person in my home, I would take on many of the physical tasks because I was “the one who could” make our lives a little easier. I learned early to associate fears or uncertainty with putting more of myself into it—I am the one who can. I learned early that when something frightens me, I can double down and work harder to make it better. I can own the challenge. When people have seen this in me as an adult, I’ve been told I seem fearless, but make no mistake, I’m not. If I seem fearless, it’s because this behavior was forged from other people’s fears.
And here I am, more than 30 years later still feeling the urge to mindlessly push myself forward when faced with overwhelming tasks ahead of me, assuming that I am the one who can and therefore should. I find myself driven to prove that I can make things happen if I work longer hours, take on more responsibility, and do more.
I do not see people who struggle financially as failures, because I have seen how strong that tide can be—it pulls you along the way. I truly get that I have been privileged to be able to avoid many of the challenges that were present in my youth. That said, I am still “the one who can” who feels she should, so if I were faced with not having enough to make ends meet for my own family, I would see myself as having failed. Though I am supported and educated, most of this is due to good fortune. I will, however, allow myself the arrogance of saying I have been careful with my choices to have encouraged that luck. My identity stems from the idea that I am “the one who can” so therefore feel obligated to do the most. I can choose to stop, and with some quite literal cold water splashed in my face, I’ve made the choice to before. But that choosing to stop is not my go-to; I move forward, driven by a fear that is so a part of me that I barely notice it’s there until I’m feeling utterly worn away.
So why all the history? You see, burnout is a fickle thing. I have heard and read a lot about burnout over the years. Burnout is real. Especially now, with COVID, many of us are balancing more than we ever have before—all at once! It’s hard, and the procrastinating, the avoidance, the shutting down impacts so many amazing professionals. There are important articles that relate to what I imagine must be the majority of people out there, but not me. That’s not what my burnout looks like.
The dangerous invisibility of zealous burnout
A lot of work environments see the extra hours, extra effort, and overall focused commitment as an asset (and sometimes that’s all it is). They see someone trying to rise to challenges, not someone stuck in their fear. Many well-meaning organizations have safeguards in place to protect their teams from burnout. But in cases like this, those alarms are not always tripped, and then when the inevitable stop comes, some members of the organization feel surprised and disappointed. And sometimes maybe even betrayed.
Parents—more so mothers, statistically speaking—are praised as being so on top of it all when they can work, be involved in the after-school activities, practice self-care in the form of diet and exercise, and still meet friends for coffee or wine. During COVID many of us have binged countless streaming episodes showing how it’s so hard for the female protagonist, but she is strong and funny and can do it. It’s a “very special episode” when she breaks down, cries in the bathroom, woefully admits she needs help, and just stops for a bit. Truth is, countless people are hiding their tears or are doom-scrolling to escape. We know that the media is a lie to amuse us, but often the perception that it’s what we should strive for has penetrated much of society.
Women and burnout
I love men. And though I don’t love every man (heads up, I don’t love every woman or nonbinary person either), I think there is a beautiful spectrum of individuals who represent that particular binary gender.
That said, women are still more often at risk of burnout than their male counterparts, especially in these COVID stressed times. Mothers in the workplace feel the pressure to do all the “mom” things while giving 110%. Mothers not in the workplace feel they need to do more to “justify” their lack of traditional employment. Women who are not mothers often feel the need to do even more because they don’t have that extra pressure at home. It’s vicious and systemic and so a part of our culture that we’re often not even aware of the enormity of the pressures we put on ourselves and each other.
And there are prices beyond happiness too. Harvard Health Publishing released a study a decade ago that “uncovered strong links between women’s job stress and cardiovascular disease.” The CDC noted, “Heart disease is the leading cause of death for women in the United States, killing 299,578 women in 2017—or about 1 in every 5 female deaths.”
This relationship between work stress and health, from what I have read, is more dangerous for women than it is for their non-female counterparts.
But what if your burnout isn’t like that either?
That might not be you either. After all, each of us is so different and how we respond to stressors is too. It’s part of what makes us human. Don’t stress what burnout looks like, just learn to recognize it in yourself. Here are a few questions I sometimes ask friends if I am concerned about them.
Are you happy? This simple question should be the first thing you ask yourself. Chances are, even if you’re burning out doing all the things you love, as you approach burnout you’ll just stop taking as much joy from it all.
Do you feel empowered to say no? I have observed in myself and others that when someone is burning out, they no longer feel they can say no to things. Even those who don’t “speed up” feel pressure to say yes to not disappoint the people around them.
What are three things you’ve done for yourself? Another observance is that we all tend to stop doing things for ourselves. Anything from skipping showers and eating poorly to avoiding talking to friends. These can be red flags.
Are you making excuses? Many of us try to disregard feelings of burnout. Over and over I have heard, “It’s just crunch time,” “As soon as I do this one thing, it will all be better,” and “Well I should be able to handle this, so I’ll figure it out.” And it might really be crunch time, a single goal, and/or a skill set you need to learn. That happens—life happens. BUT if this doesn’t stop, be honest with yourself. If you’ve worked more 50-hour weeks since January than not, maybe it’s not crunch time—maybe it’s a bad situation that you’re burning out from.
Do you have a plan to stop feeling this way? If something is truly temporary and you do need to just push through, then it has an exit route with a defined end.
Take the time to listen to yourself as you would a friend. Be honest, allow yourself to be uncomfortable, and break the thought cycles that prevent you from healing.
So now what?
What I just described is a different path to burnout, but it’s still burnout. There are well-established approaches to working through burnout:
Get enough sleep.
Eat healthy.
Work out.
Get outside.
Take a break.
Overall, practice self-care.
Those are hard for me because they feel like more tasks. If I’m in the burnout cycle, doing any of the above for me feels like a waste. The narrative is that if I’m already failing, why would I take care of myself when I’m dropping all those other balls? People need me, right?
If you’re deep in the cycle, your inner voice might be pretty awful by now. If you need to, tell yourself you need to take care of the person your people depend on. If your roles are pushing you toward burnout, use them to help make healing easier by justifying the time spent working on you.
To help remind myself of the airline attendant message about putting the mask on yourself first, I have come up with a few things that I do when I start feeling myself going into a zealous burnout.
Cook an elaborate meal for someone!
OK, I am a “food-focused” individual so cooking for someone is always my go-to. There are countless tales in my home of someone walking into the kitchen and turning right around and walking out when they noticed I was “chopping angrily.” But it’s more than that, and you should give it a try. Seriously. It’s the perfect go-to if you don’t feel worthy of taking time for yourself—do it for someone else. Most of us work in a digital world, so cooking can fill all of your senses and force you to be in the moment with all the ways you perceive the world. It can break you out of your head and help you gain a better perspective. In my house, I’ve been known to pick a place on the map and cook food that comes from wherever that is (thank you, Pinterest). I love cooking Indian food, as the smells are warm, the bread needs just enough kneading to keep my hands busy, and the process takes real attention for me because it’s not what I was brought up making. And in the end, we all win!
Vent like a foul-mouthed fool
Be careful with this one!
I have been making an effort to practice more gratitude over the past few years, and I recognize the true benefits of that. That said, sometimes you just gotta let it all out—even the ugly. Hell, I’m a big fan of not sugarcoating our lives, and that sometimes means that to get past the big pile of poop, you’re gonna wanna complain about it a bit.
When that is what’s needed, turn to a trusted friend and allow yourself some pure verbal diarrhea, saying all the things that are bothering you. You need to trust this friend not to judge, to see your pain, and, most importantly, to tell you to remove your cranium from your own rectal cavity. Seriously, it’s about getting a reality check here! One of the things I admire the most about my husband (though often after the fact) is his ability to break things down to their simplest. “We’re spending our lives together, of course you’re going to disappoint me from time to time, so get over it” has been his way of speaking his dedication, love, and acceptance of me—and I could not be more grateful. It also, of course, has meant that I needed to remove my head from that rectal cavity. So, again, usually those moments are appreciated in hindsight.
Pick up a book!
There are many books out there that aren’t so much self-help as they are people just like you sharing their stories and how they’ve come to find greater balance. Maybe you’ll find something that speaks to you. Titles that have stood out to me include:
Thrive by Arianna Huffington
Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss
Girl, Stop Apologizing by Rachel Hollis
Dare to Lead by Brené Brown
Or, another tactic I love to employ is to read or listen to a book that has NOTHING to do with my work-life balance. I’ve read the following books and found they helped balance me out because my mind was pondering their interesting topics instead of running in circles:
The Drunken Botanist by Amy Stewart
Superlife by Darin Olien
A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived by Adam Rutherford
Gaia’s Garden by Toby Hemenway
If you’re not into reading, pick up a topic on YouTube or choose a podcast to subscribe to. I’ve watched countless permaculture and gardening topics in addition to how to raise chickens and ducks. For the record, I do not have a particularly large food garden, nor do I own livestock of any kind…yet. I just find the topic interesting, and it has nothing to do with any aspect of my life that needs anything from me.
Forgive yourself
You are never going to be perfect—hell, it would be boring if you were. It’s OK to be broken and flawed. It’s human to be tired and sad and worried. It’s OK to not do it all. It’s scary to be imperfect, but you cannot be brave if nothing were scary.
This last one is the most important: allow yourself permission to NOT do it all. You never promised to be everything to everyone at all times. We are more powerful than the fears that drive us.
This is hard. It is hard for me. It’s what’s driven me to write this—that it’s OK to stop. It’s OK that your unhealthy habit that might even benefit those around you needs to end. You can still be successful in life.
I recently read that we are all writing our eulogy in how we live. Knowing that your professional accomplishments won’t be mentioned in that speech, what will yours say? What do you want it to say?
Look, I get that none of these ideas will “fix it,” and that’s not their purpose. None of us are in control of our surroundings, only how we respond to them. These suggestions are to help stop the spiral effect so that you are empowered to address the underlying issues and choose your response. They are things that work for me most of the time. Maybe they’ll work for you.
Does this sound familiar?
If this sounds familiar, it’s not just you. Don’t let your negative self-talk tell you that you “even burn out wrong.” It’s not wrong. Even if rooted in fear like my own drivers, I believe that this need to do more comes from a place of love, determination, motivation, and other wonderful attributes that make you the amazing person you are. We’re going to be OK, ya know. The lives that unfold before us might never look like that story in our head—that idea of “perfect” or “done” we’re looking for, but that’s OK. Really, when we stop and look around, usually the only eyes that judge us are in the mirror.
Do you remember that Winnie the Pooh sketch that had Pooh eat so much at Rabbit’s house that his buttocks couldn’t fit through the door? Well, I already associate a lot with Rabbit, so it came as no surprise when he abruptly declared that this was unacceptable. But do you recall what happened next? He put a shelf across poor Pooh’s ankles and decorations on his back, and made the best of the big butt in his kitchen.
At the end of the day we are resourceful and know that we are able to push ourselves if we need to—even when we are tired to our core or have a big butt of fluff ‘n’ stuff in our room. None of us has to be afraid, as we can manage any obstacle put in front of us. And maybe that means we will need to redefine success to allow space for being uncomfortably human, but that doesn’t really sound so bad either.
So, wherever you are right now, please breathe. Do what you need to do to get out of your head. Forgive and take care.
Feedback, in whichever form it takes, and whatever it may be called, is one of the most effective soft skills that we have at our disposal to collaboratively get our designs to a better place while growing our own skills and perspectives.
Feedback is also one of the most underestimated tools, and often by assuming that we’re already good at it, we settle, forgetting that it’s a skill that can be trained, grown, and improved. Poor feedback can create confusion in projects, bring down morale, and affect trust and team collaboration over the long term. Quality feedback can be a transformative force.
Practicing our skills is surely a good way to improve, but the learning gets even faster when it’s paired with a good foundation that channels and focuses the practice. What are some foundational aspects of giving good feedback? And how can feedback be adjusted for remote and distributed work environments?
On the web, we can identify a long tradition of asynchronous feedback: from the early days of open source, code was shared and discussed on mailing lists. Today, developers engage on pull requests, designers comment in their favorite design tools, project managers and scrum masters exchange ideas on tickets, and so on.
Design critique is often the name used for a type of feedback that’s provided to make our work better, collaboratively. So it shares a lot of the principles with feedback in general, but it also has some differences.
The content
The foundation of every good critique is the feedback’s content, so that’s where we need to start. There are many models that you can use to shape your content. The one that I personally like best—because it’s clear and actionable—is this one from Lara Hogan.
While this equation is generally used to give feedback to people, it also fits really well in a design critique because it ultimately answers some of the core questions that we work on: What? Where? Why? How? Imagine that you’re giving some feedback about some design work that spans multiple screens, like an onboarding flow: there are some pages shown, a flow blueprint, and an outline of the decisions made. You spot something that could be improved. If you keep the three elements of the equation in mind, you’ll have a mental model that can help you be more precise and effective.
Here is a comment that could be given as a part of some feedback, and it might look reasonable at a first glance: it seems to superficially fulfill the elements in the equation. But does it?
Not sure about the buttons’ styles and hierarchy—it feels off. Can you change them?
Observation for design feedback doesn’t just mean pointing out which part of the interface your feedback refers to, but it also refers to offering a perspective that’s as specific as possible. Are you providing the user’s perspective? Your expert perspective? A business perspective? The project manager’s perspective? A first-time user’s perspective?
When I see these two buttons, I expect one to go forward and one to go back.
Impact is about the why. Just pointing out a UI element might sometimes be enough if the issue may be obvious, but more often than not, you should add an explanation of what you’re pointing out.
When I see these two buttons, I expect one to go forward and one to go back. But this is the only screen where this happens, as before we just used a single button and an “×” to close. This seems to be breaking the consistency in the flow.
The question approach is meant to provide open guidance by eliciting the critical thinking in the designer receiving the feedback. Notably, in Lara’s equation she provides a second approach: request, which instead provides guidance toward a specific solution. While that’s a viable option for feedback in general, for design critiques, in my experience, defaulting to the question approach usually reaches the best solutions because designers are generally more comfortable in being given an open space to explore.
The difference between the two can be exemplified with, for the question approach:
When I see these two buttons, I expect one to go forward and one to go back. But this is the only screen where this happens, as before we just used a single button and an “×” to close. This seems to be breaking the consistency in the flow. Would it make sense to unify them?
Or, for the request approach:
When I see these two buttons, I expect one to go forward and one to go back. But this is the only screen where this happens, as before we just used a single button and an “×” to close. This seems to be breaking the consistency in the flow. Let’s make sure that all screens have the same pair of forward and back buttons.
At this point in some situations, it might be useful to integrate with an extra why: why you consider the given suggestion to be better.
When I see these two buttons, I expect one to go forward and one to go back. But this is the only screen where this happens, as before we just used a single button and an “×” to close. This seems to be breaking the consistency in the flow. Let’s make sure that all screens have the same two forward and back buttons so that users don’t get confused.
Choosing the question approach or the request approach can also at times be a matter of personal preference. A while ago, I was putting a lot of effort into improving my feedback: I did rounds of anonymous feedback, and I reviewed feedback with other people. After a few rounds of this work and a year later, I got a positive response: my feedback came across as effective and grounded. Until I changed teams. To my shock, my next round of feedback from one specific person wasn’t that great. The reason is that I had previously tried not to be prescriptive in my advice—because the people who I was previously working with preferred the open-ended question format over the request style of suggestions. But now in this other team, there was one person who instead preferred specific guidance. So I adapted my feedback for them to include requests.
One comment that I heard come up a few times is that this kind of feedback is quite long, and it doesn’t seem very efficient. No… but also yes. Let’s explore both sides.
No, this style of feedback is actually efficient because the length here is a byproduct of clarity, and spending time giving this kind of feedback can provide exactly enough information for a good fix. Also if we zoom out, it can reduce future back-and-forth conversations and misunderstandings, improving the overall efficiency and effectiveness of collaboration beyond the single comment. Imagine that in the example above the feedback were instead just, “Let’s make sure that all screens have the same two forward and back buttons.” The designer receiving this feedback wouldn’t have much to go by, so they might just apply the change. In later iterations, the interface might change or they might introduce new features—and maybe that change might not make sense anymore. Without the why, the designer might imagine that the change is about consistency… but what if it wasn’t? So there could now be an underlying concern that changing the buttons would be perceived as a regression.
Yes, this style of feedback is not always efficient because the points in some comments don’t always need to be exhaustive, sometimes because certain changes may be obvious (“The font used doesn’t follow our guidelines”) and sometimes because the team may have a lot of internal knowledge such that some of the whys may be implied.
So the equation above isn’t meant to suggest a strict template for feedback but a mnemonic to reflect and improve the practice. Even after years of active work on my critiques, I still from time to time go back to this formula and reflect on whether what I just wrote is effective.
The tone
Well-grounded content is the foundation of feedback, but that’s not really enough. The soft skills of the person who’s providing the critique can multiply the likelihood that the feedback will be well received and understood. Tone alone can make the difference between content that’s rejected or welcomed, and it’s been demonstrated that only positive feedback creates sustained change in people.
Since our goal is to be understood and to have a positive working environment, tone is essential to work on. Over the years, I’ve tried to summarize the required soft skills in a formula that mirrors the one for content: the receptivity equation.
Respectful feedback comes across as grounded, solid, and constructive. It’s the kind of feedback that, whether it’s positive or negative, is perceived as useful and fair.
Timing refers to when the feedback happens. To-the-point feedback doesn’t have much hope of being well received if it’s given at the wrong time. Questioning the entire high-level information architecture of a new feature when it’s about to ship might still be relevant if that questioning highlights a major blocker that nobody saw, but it’s way more likely that those concerns will have to wait for a later rework. So in general, attune your feedback to the stage of the project. Early iteration? Late iteration? Polishing work in progress? These all have different needs. The right timing will make it more likely that your feedback will be well received.
Attitude is the equivalent of intent, and in the context of person-to-person feedback, it can be referred to as radical candor. That means checking before we write to see whether what we have in mind will truly help the person and make the project better overall. This might be a hard reflection at times because maybe we don’t want to admit that we don’t really appreciate that person. Hopefully that’s not the case, but that can happen, and that’s okay. Acknowledging and owning that can help you make up for that: how would I write if I really cared about them? How can I avoid being passive aggressive? How can I be more constructive?
Form is relevant especially in a diverse and cross-cultural work environments because having great content, perfect timing, and the right attitude might not come across if the way that we write creates misunderstandings. There might be many reasons for this: sometimes certain words might trigger specific reactions; sometimes nonnative speakers might not understand all the nuances of some sentences; sometimes our brains might just be different and we might perceive the world differently—neurodiversity must be taken into consideration. Whatever the reason, it’s important to review not just what we write but how.
A few years back, I was asking for some feedback on how I give feedback. I received some good advice but also a comment that surprised me. They pointed out that when I wrote “Oh, […],” I made them feel stupid. That wasn’t my intent! I felt really bad, and I just realized that I provided feedback to them for months, and every time I might have made them feel stupid. I was horrified… but also thankful. I made a quick fix: I added “oh” in my list of replaced words (your choice between: macOS’s text replacement, aText, TextExpander, or others) so that when I typed “oh,” it was instantly deleted.
Something to highlight because it’s quite frequent—especially in teams that have a strong group spirit—is that people tend to beat around the bush. It’s important to remember here that a positive attitude doesn’t mean going light on the feedback—it just means that even when you provide hard, difficult, or challenging feedback, you do so in a way that’s respectful and constructive. The nicest thing that you can do for someone is to help them grow.
We have a great advantage in giving feedback in written form: it can be reviewed by another person who isn’t directly involved, which can help to reduce or remove any bias that might be there. I found that the best, most insightful moments for me have happened when I’ve shared a comment and I’ve asked someone who I highly trusted, “How does this sound?,” “How can I do it better,” and even “How would you have written it?”—and I’ve learned a lot by seeing the two versions side by side.
The format
Asynchronous feedback also has a major inherent advantage: we can take more time to refine what we’ve written to make sure that it fulfills two main goals: the clarity of communication and the actionability of the suggestions.
Let’s imagine that someone shared a design iteration for a project. You are reviewing it and leaving a comment. There are many ways to do this, and of course context matters, but let’s try to think about some elements that may be useful to consider.
In terms of clarity, start by grounding the critique that you’re about to give by providing context. Specifically, this means describing where you’re coming from: do you have a deep knowledge of the project, or is this the first time that you’re seeing it? Are you coming from a high-level perspective, or are you figuring out the details? Are there regressions? Which user’s perspective are you taking when providing your feedback? Is the design iteration at a point where it would be okay to ship this, or are there major things that need to be addressed first?
Providing context is helpful even if you’re sharing feedback within a team that already has some information on the project. And context is absolutely essential when giving cross-team feedback. If I were to review a design that might be indirectly related to my work, and if I had no knowledge about how the project arrived at that point, I would say so, highlighting my take as external.
We often focus on the negatives, trying to outline all the things that could be done better. That’s of course important, but it’s just as important—if not more—to focus on the positives, especially if you saw progress from the previous iteration. This might seem superfluous, but it’s important to keep in mind that design is a discipline where there are hundreds of possible solutions for every problem. So pointing out that the design solution that was chosen is good and explaining why it’s good has two major benefits: it confirms that the approach taken was solid, and it helps to ground your negative feedback. In the longer term, sharing positive feedback can help prevent regressions on things that are going well because those things will have been highlighted as important. As a bonus, positive feedback can also help reduce impostor syndrome.
There’s one powerful approach that combines both context and a focus on the positives: frame how the design is better than the status quo (compared to a previous iteration, competitors, or benchmarks) and why, and then on that foundation, you can add what could be improved. This is powerful because there’s a big difference between a critique that’s for a design that’s already in good shape and a critique that’s for a design that isn’t quite there yet.
Another way that you can improve your feedback is to depersonalize the feedback: the comments should always be about the work, never about the person who made it. It’s “This button isn’t well aligned” versus “You haven’t aligned this button well.” This is very easy to change in your writing by reviewing it just before sending.
In terms of actionability, one of the best approaches to help the designer who’s reading through your feedback is to split it into bullet points or paragraphs, which are easier to review and analyze one by one. For longer pieces of feedback, you might also consider splitting it into sections or even across multiple comments. Of course, adding screenshots or signifying markers of the specific part of the interface you’re referring to can also be especially useful.
One approach that I’ve personally used effectively in some contexts is to enhance the bullet points with four markers using emojis. So a red square 🟥 means that it’s something that I consider blocking; a yellow diamond 🔶 is something that I can be convinced otherwise, but it seems to me that it should be changed; and a green circle 🟢 is a detailed, positive confirmation. I also use a blue spiral 🌀 for either something that I’m not sure about, an exploration, an open alternative, or just a note. But I’d use this approach only on teams where I’ve already established a good level of trust because if it happens that I have to deliver a lot of red squares, the impact could be quite demoralizing, and I’d reframe how I’d communicate that a bit.
Let’s see how this would work by reusing the example that we used earlier as the first bullet point in this list:
🔶 Navigation—When I see these two buttons, I expect one to go forward and one to go back. But this is the only screen where this happens, as before we just used a single button and an “×” to close. This seems to be breaking the consistency in the flow. Let’s make sure that all screens have the same two forward and back buttons so that users don’t get confused.
🟢 Overall—I think the page is solid, and this is good enough to be our release candidate for a version 1.0.
🟢 Metrics—Good improvement in the buttons on the metrics area; the improved contrast and new focus style make them more accessible.
🟥 Button Style—Using the green accent in this context creates the impression that it’s a positive action because green is usually perceived as a confirmation color. Do we need to explore a different color?
🔶Tiles—Given the number of items on the page, and the overall page hierarchy, it seems to me that the tiles shouldn’t be using the Subtitle 1 style but the Subtitle 2 style. This will keep the visual hierarchy more consistent.
🌀 Background—Using a light texture works well, but I wonder whether it adds too much noise in this kind of page. What is the thinking in using that?
What about giving feedback directly in Figma or another design tool that allows in-place feedback? In general, I find these difficult to use because they hide discussions and they’re harder to track, but in the right context, they can be very effective. Just make sure that each of the comments is separate so that it’s easier to match each discussion to a single task, similar to the idea of splitting mentioned above.
One final note: say the obvious. Sometimes we might feel that something is obviously good or obviously wrong, and so we don’t say it. Or sometimes we might have a doubt that we don’t express because the question might sound stupid. Say it—that’s okay. You might have to reword it a little bit to make the reader feel more comfortable, but don’t hold it back. Good feedback is transparent, even when it may be obvious.
There’s another advantage of asynchronous feedback: written feedback automatically tracks decisions. Especially in large projects, “Why did we do this?” could be a question that pops up from time to time, and there’s nothing better than open, transparent discussions that can be reviewed at any time. For this reason, I recommend using software that saves these discussions, without hiding them once they are resolved.
Content, tone, and format. Each one of these subjects provides a useful model, but working to improve eight areas—observation, impact, question, timing, attitude, form, clarity, and actionability—is a lot of work to put in all at once. One effective approach is to take them one by one: first identify the area that you lack the most (either from your perspective or from feedback from others) and start there. Then the second, then the third, and so on. At first you’ll have to put in extra time for every piece of feedback that you give, but after a while, it’ll become second nature, and your impact on the work will multiply.
Thanks to Brie Anne Demkiw and Mike Shelton for reviewing the first draft of this article.
