Summer movie season is in swing, and normally by May I have a pretty good feeling about how the summer will go, but this year? F-ck if I know. There’s so much nerviness about the economy, it’s hard to tell how big the summer audiences will be.
Sinners is still doing incredibly well ($284 million worldwide and counting), so people are willing to go to the movies, the question is just how often. Summer 2025 is stacked, with multiple tentpoles butting up against each other in a way that suggests someone is going to lose (not unlike how Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning lost when it went up against Barbenheimer).
Roughly six weeks from its release, I’m still not sure how much people will buy into Brad Pitt’s vroom vroom movie, F1. The main trailer dropped yesterday, and while I like the cast a lot—Damson Idris, Kerry Condon, and Javier Bardem are a solid support corps—I’m still not sold on these trailers. I do like this new trailer more than the first one, mainly because it shows off more of the ensemble and I DO like this cast a lot.
I’m into Damson Idris squaring up to Pitt, and I like the little bit with Pitt and Bardem. They’re leaning hard on “from the director of Top Gun: Maverick” in the marketing, obviously hoping to do with tires what Maverick did with wings, but while the aviation scenes were definitely a centerpiece of Maverick, that movie succeeded in no small part due to the ensemble. I’m not sure the ensemble of F1 is enough to get me to buy in when the trailers aren’t immediately grabbing me.
Looking at summer 2025, F1 might be the biggest question mark I have.
