Top 10 movies for 2020

Top+10+movies+for+2020

Liam Heneghan, Staff Writer

So at first, I wanted to make this a list of my 20 most anticipated movies in 2020. It seemed fitting, but let’s be honest with ourselves. None of you have the time to read an article that long, and I certainly don’t have the time to write all that. So instead I’m just going to list those 20 films and then talk about my thoughts on the top ten.

20. Morbius

19. Wonder Woman 1984

18. Eternals

17.Sonic the Hedgehog

16. Gretel and Hansel

15. Onward

14. Invisible Man

13. Antlers

12. Ghostbusters: Afterlife

11. Black Widow

10. Bill and Ted Face the Music

I don’t think I’m alone in the “I would watch Keanu Reeves do literally anything for two and a half hours, and I’d happily pay fourteen US dollars to do so” camp. The man can do no wrong. This is also exciting because it’s been almost thirty years since the last installment in this series. I remember watching Bill and Ted’s excellent adventure repeatedly as a kid, and I can’t wait to see how the filmmakers are going to take that screwball 80s comedy and bring it into modern day.

  1. Antebellum

I honestly have no IDEA what this movie is going to be about, and I have no desire to find out before I head to the theater to see it. Sometimes it’s nice to be surprised.  The trailer is spine chilling though, and I’m absolutely here for it. When that plane clips out of the frame? Legit chills.

  1. Birds of Prey

It hurts my soul to say that I’m excited for a DCEU movie, cause I’ve been burned too many times before: Man of Steel, Batman v Superman, Suicide Squad etc. That last one in particular was a real let down. The trailers were bombastic, exciting, and best of all, they were scored with Bohemian Rhapsody. I mean really, who can refuse the call of Queen? The movie on the other hand… whoooo boy. Let’s just say it wasn’t winning any Oscars. One part of that movie stood out though. Among all of the crap in that film, Margot Robbie’s performance as Harley Quinn was actually… enjoyable? I’m glad she’s getting her own movie, and based on the trailers it’s going to be crazy exciting… though I’ve thought that before, so I’m gonna keep my expectations realistic. 

  1. Tenet

Christopher Nolan always delivers. That’s whats got me onboard for this one. From The Dark Knight and Dunkirk to Memento and The Prestige, the man never fails to bring something new and exciting to the screen. Just working off the trailer alone, tenet doesn’t seem to be anything to write home about – an average action thriller, with some wacky temporal mechanics – but the director’s track record has me convinced that what we’re actually going to get is something very special.

  1. New Mutants

I’m gonna be honest, I never thought this movie was going to see the light of day. We saw the first trailer for this horror inspired X-Men spin off back in 2018, but when Disney bought out 20th Century Fox, it was shelved for 2 years because the house of mouse didn’t want it competing with their other blockbuster films. After the lackluster response Dark Phoenix received at the box office, I genuinely thought Disney might push this straight through to Disney+, or worse yet, that they would can it completely. From the new trailer though, it looks like that’s not happening, instead, we’re going to get one more installment in the X-Men series before Disney inevitably retires that canon so they can put the characters in the MCU, and what a film it looks to be shaping up to be. I really dig the monster movie vibe they’re going for.

  1. Artemis Fowl

Now by now you might have noticed that films I’ve been writing about aren’t necessarily the ones that are going to be the best, I’m almost positive that I’m going to enjoy anything that Marvel studios puts out, so there’s really not much I have to say about them… Artemis Fowl though, that’s a risky move. I’m not sure this is going to play out well, in fact, I’m almost certain that it won’t. The source material is just inherently resists adaptation. The book the movie is based on is a YA novel about a teenage boy who discovers that fairies are real… and uses that knowledge to blackmail them. It’s a book written for children about a hostage negotiation. For this movie to make it past the MPAA it would have to drop a lot of what made the original series special, but if it keeps that content it wouldn’t be able to hit its target demographic. All this aside though, I really enjoyed the Artemis Fowl books as a kid, and I’ve been waiting a long time for this adaptation. I hope they can pull off the balancing act. I really do.

  1. A Quiet Place 2

I didn’t think the first Quiet Place really needed a sequel. It was a self contained narrative with phenomenal acting, a heavy importance placed on visual storytelling, and quite a few genuinely scary moments. I didn’t know that it was getting a sequel until the day I heard that the trailer dropped. At first I thought it was silly to come back to the narrative, and who knows? I might still be proven right, but all it took was the two minutes of the movie that we got to wipe those fears from my mind. Its a smart move to shift focus away from the monsters and to investigate the more human elements of this apocalypse. We already saw the monster movie once, I’m excited to see how this new direction Krasinski is heading plays out.

  1. The King’s Man

What can I say, the Kingsman movies are my guilty pleasure. The first one is still one of my favorite movies to this day (I mean did you see the scene in the church?) and while I’m aware that the second movie has its flaws, I love it all the same. The way Mathew Vaughn films his action just brings me such pure unbridled joy, and I won’t stop going to see these movies until they stop making them. I was under the impression that the third film in the franchise was going to be a spin-off featuring the Statesmen (The American branch of the titular secret agency), so Imagine my surprise when a poster for this upcoming period piece arrived at work for me to unpack (I had a job at a movie theater over the summer) with an eerily familiar title. One quick google search later, and I was already hyped for this release – I’m still hyped in fact, and the trailer only added more kindling to that fire.

  1. In The Heights

I’m an absolute sucker for a well edited trailer, and this might well be the best one I’ve ever seen. I remembered seeing this play once, several years ago, but I couldn’t for the life of me recall any of the specifics. I ended up listening to the cast album of the musical to refresh my memory, and oh boy am I glad I did. Lin Manuel Miranda just never disappoints. I fell in love with Hamilton (like pretty much everyone else on the face of the earth) a few years ago, and I still listen to it pretty regularly. Recently though, In The Heights has taken its place in the rotation, and I have the cast album on repeat in Spotify. It’s rare that a movie will generate a genuine obsession in me, and rarer still for a simple trailer to pull it off. This movie has my ticket money on that strength alone – plus the visuals look absolutely STUNNING, and I cannot wait to see how they translate this musical I’ve grown so fond of to the silver screen.

  1. Last Night In Soho

And at last we come to my most anticipated film of 2020… and it doesn’t even have a trailer yet. Let me explain. If the last entry here seemed a bit personal to you, than you might wanna just avert your gaze for this one, because things are about to get VERY biased. Last Night in Soho is directed by Edgar Wright, my all time favorite director. I got to see a sneak preview of one of his films at a convention a few years back, and it actually convinced me to dedicate myself to cinematography as a career path. You may know Wright from his film Baby Driver that came out in 2018, or his adaptation of the graphic novel series Scott Pilgrim vs The World, or even from his earlier collaborative work on spoof films Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and At World’s End, with Nick Frost and Simon Pegg. Or maybe not. Maybe you’ve never even heard of any of these movies, and if that’s the case, I STRONGLY recommend that you check them out. I promise you will not be disappointed. I made a joke way back at the start of this list about being willing to pay theater money to watch Keanu Reeves do literally anything, but I’m being 100% serious right now: If Edgar Wright filmed and released 2 hours of a blank screen I would be there on opening night 15 dollars poorer. My faith in the man is just that great. He will always have my money sight unseen, hell or high water. Because he’s earned it.

 

So those are my top ten most anticipated movies of 2020. If I missed a movie that you’re dying to see… well I can’t really help you there, but feel free to leave an angry comment disagreeing with me. It helps our engagement numbers!