Our most anticipated movies of 2024 include many that were on the receiving end of a studio bump in 2023. For some, that reflected a lack of confidence in selling the movie to the public without the cast doing the talk show circuit. For others, it was because their awards chances were stifled before they ever began. Movies like Challengers shelved their horny love triangles until the studios bent to SAG-AFTRA’s will. Those like Evil Does Not Exist took a backseat to Perfect Days, the latter of which was selected as Japan’s entry for the International Oscar. In a funnier, far more specific case, The People’s Joker was dodging cease-and-desists until it found a distributor ready to go to bat for its anarchic satire of all things Gotham.
But aside from those, there are blockbusters completing their two-part promise (looking at you, Dune) and auteurs tackling their biggest projects yet (Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu…please undo 2023’s terrible vampire year). Our most anticipated movies of 2024 highlight those we caught at film festivals last year and ones that just caught our eyes with a trailer, an image, or even just a premise. Even those we’re a little more skeptical about — Minari filmmaker Lee Isaac Chung joining the IP blockbuster rat race with Twisters; Alex Garland pitting Texas and California against the other states in Civil War — are providing opportunities for talented artists to make that paper. Good for them. Barry Jenkins is making a new movie! That’s great…even if it’s a photoreal animated lion movie. But the movies we’re most excited about are those that we already know rule and want to share with you, or those we think will overcome the odds (either by virtue of their subject matter, filmmaker, cast, or all of the above) and wow us sight unseen.
This list is of course not set in stone, as release dates shift due to all sorts of things — half of these movies are coming out this year because of last year’s strike.
But for now, here are Paste’s most anticipated movies of 2024, listed by release date:
Drive-Away Dolls
Release Date: February 23
Director: Ethan Coen
Joel Coen stepped out for a solo project in 2021, The Tragedy of Macbeth, and now Ethan is preparing to debut his own: Drive-Away Dolls. Featuring Paste favorites Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan as the unlucky pair saddled with a criminal enterprise’s briefcase, Drive-Away Dolls looks gay, ridiculous and full of classic misunderstanding-fueled mishaps. Coen also co-wrote with his wife/editor Tricia Cooke, filling the road trip film with dumb criminals, dumber politicians, tough lesbians and a caper’s worth of screwball silliness. Classic Coen stuff!
Mickey 17
Release Date: March 29
Director: Bong Joon-ho
Director Bong’s first movie since winning four Oscars with Parasite, Mickey 17 plops a bevy of Robert Pattinsons into an adaptation of Edward Ashton’s sci-fi novel Mickey7, named for the current iteration of disposable employee Mickey. The clone (whose new bodies come complete with his old ones’ memories) is a colonizer, working on an ice planet named for Norse mythology’s frozen hellscape Niflheim. I guess in the movie, we’re getting a Mickey with a few more lives under the hood than in the novel. Steven Yeun, Naomi Ackie, Toni Collette and Mark Ruffalo co-star (the latter with the amazing character name Hieronymous Marshall) in a movie that has more than a few passing similarities to Moon and Bong’s own take on Snowpiercer. A cold wasteland and the devaluation of human life? Bong’s on it.
The People’s Joker
Release Date: April 5
Director: Vera Drew
A feat of parody so outrageous that its legend (and strongly worded letter from corporate) precedes it, The People’s Joker is an endlessly amusing, deeply personal, wildly inventive collision of genres all bent to the will of filmmaker Vera Drew. Her queer coming-of-age is filtered through the language and imagery of Batman media, her transition and alt-comedy leanings all given hilarious reflections in the Rogues’ Gallery of Gotham. But it’s through the combination of DIY greenscreen work and effervescent, scrappy animation captured in populist media like Minecraft and VR Chat that the film’s indie production wins you over. The resulting collage is like visiting your childhood bedroom, and relating the sticker-covered walls to your adult life. Also, all the stickers are voiced by people like Maria Bamford, Scott Aukerman, Tim Heidecker and Bob Odenkirk. Drew herself is a charismatic performer, as is Kane Distler, who plays her romantic foil (who is also a Joker), but it’s Phil Braun’s ridiculous Batman that always steals the show. The riotous, anarchic result is everything the corporate use of the Joker isn’t, and everything it could be. The People’s Joker is a deftly assembled reckoning of how we use art — ranging from the cribbed comic aesthetic to the film’s Lorne Michaels-skewering comedy scene — to craft ourselves.–Jacob Oller
Challengers
Release Date: April 26
Director: Luca Guadagnino
A movie pulled from festivals and bumped from 2023’s release calendar because of the labor strikes, Challengers knows that its power lies in its cast. Zendaya plays the wife and coach of tennis champ Mike Faist, who is about to play Josh O’Connor in a big match — and did we mention they all hooked up once upon a time? Luca Guadagnino is back to make the twinks dance to his particularly horny tune, with Zendaya as the center of their attention. Blending sports rivalry, athletic ability and sexual competition, Challengers looks like a perfectly tense and sexy follow-up to Bones and All.
Evil Does Not Exist
Release Date: May 5
Director: Ryusuke Hamaguchi
Evil Does Not Exist opens with the camera languorously tracking through treetops, seen from the ground, until interrupting itself abruptly with a music-stopping shot of Hana (Ryo Nishikawa), a grade-school-aged girl with her neck craned up – suggesting we were previously sharing her point of view. The implied closeness of that opening shot is the nearest the camera gets to its characters for a while; it’s 10, maybe 15 minutes before anyone in the movie is seen in anything resembling a close-up. We meet Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), Hana’s father, and figure out some details of their life, explaining the remoteness of the cinematography: They live in a woodsy Japanese village, broadly isolated but not alone, enjoying the quiet. We watch as Takumi performs outdoorsy tasks — chopping wood, hauling fresh well water — until we realize that, put together with minding Hana, they form his job, of sorts. Takumi and Hana aren’t that far from society; Takumi delivers the well water to a local udon restaurant, not exactly a strictly survivalist outpost. But there’s something pristine and untouched about their environment, making the interest of a company called Playmode both natural and horribly unnatural all at once. For a little while, it seems like Hamaguchi has made his own quiet, non-cutesy version of the story where the company man is tasked with steamrolling a small town, only to find himself charmed by its inhabitants and way of life. Evil Does Not Exist doesn’t exactly swerve away from that narrative; instead, it shifts again, slowly but surely, this time into more unsettling (and unsettled) territory. Hamaguchi’s previous film, his U.S. breakthrough and recipient of a Best Picture Oscar nomination, was the deliberate, sometimes mesmerizing Drive My Car. Evil Does Not Exist is only a little over half that movie’s length, and though it allows its characters a certain measure of soul-bearing conversation, it plays certain offscreen developments even closer to the vest. Hamaguchi’s film – and the performance style of Omika, a Hamaguchi crew member moving into acting here – is too controlled to produce an anguished tragedy out of this material, but it’s too unsparing to offer an easy exit. Even the most formidable steamrollers can’t always clear a path out of the wilderness.–Jesse Hassenger
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Release Date: May 24
Director: George Miller
Sure the trailer for Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga doesn’t quite look as polished as the final product of Mad Max: Fury Road. But, first off, the prequel focusing on Charlize Theron’s Imperator (here played by an always wild-eyed Anya Taylor-Joy) isn’t out yet, so hold your horses. And, second, when in doubt, trust in George Miller. The man pulled off Fury Road! And also Babe: Pig in the City, but that seems less relevant here. I just want to watch Taylor-Joy whip some ass, drive through the desert and abuse a shirtless Chris Hemsworth. Doesn’t everyone? Let Miller unleash his hell machines once more.
The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim
Release Date: December 13
Director: Kenji Kamiyama
Bumped and rebumped, the newest addition to the Tolkien-verse (after those awful Hobbit movies and the solid-yet-unwatched Amazon show) is a long-in-the-works animated movie about the House of Helm Hammerhand…AKA the guy Helm’s Deep is named after. He was King of Rohan, and with Brian Cox providing his voice, I’m sure he’ll be a tough and salty old bastard. Helm will make a stand against an onslaught of baddies and, in so doing, earn his stronghold its title. Miranda Otto’s Éowyn returns to narrate the affair, giving it a bedtime story or fable-like quality. Director Kenji Kamiyama has been quietly taking a number of notable franchises into anime (Star Wars: Visions and Blade Runner: Black Lotus) while having a solid hand in the last few decades of Ghost in the Shell. I’m usually not one for drawn-out backstories for particularly notable elements of an established movie, or even prequels in general, but the change in medium is so tantalizing that I can’t shy away from this. Lord of the Rings anime? I just have to know what a massive Peter Jackson-like battle looks like when scale isn’t an issue and realism can be bent to your will.
Nosferatu
Release Date: December 25
Director: Robert Eggers
Filmmaker Robert Eggers hasn’t missed yet, so why wouldn’t we get behind The Witch and The Northman director’s take on the classic vampire tale? Eggers’ dedication to a period ambience in his movies, as well as his ambitious lighting and framing, supplement his dark tales with a magnetic, lived-in aesthetic. He’s a great fit if you’re looking to adapt Murnau’s German Expressionism, and, weirdly enough, The Lighthouse did make me think he could capture Nosferatu‘s tense sexuality. Nicholas Hoult, playing Thomas Hutter, has a chance to redeem himself in the eyes of bloodsuckers everywhere after Renfield, while Bill Skarsgård’s Count Orlok has an opportunity to show us if he can do any other weird things with his eyes or body aside from that wall-eyed Pennywise stare. Lily-Rose Depp, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Willem Dafoe and Ralph Ineson round out the cast, but all eyes will be on the obsessed Orlok (and if Depp can hold up in a role once claimed by Anna Taylor-Joy).
Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World
Release Date: TBD
Director: Radu Jude
Radu Jude’s literalized mouthful Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World depicts, perhaps, the most accurate representation of the dystopia we live in, and the supposed impending dystopia that we’re in the process of arriving at. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World largely centers on a day in the life of young Romanian woman Angela (Ilinca Manolache), an overworked, underpaid film production assistant, driving around Bucharest to cast for a work accident film. The film has been commissioned by a major company obviously attempting to cover the tracks left by lax safety precautions for their workers, fronted by a suit named Doris Goethe (Nina Hoss)—funnily, a direct relation to the influential German writer. Between meetings, Angela films intentionally provocative and popular TikToks playing the character of an Andrew Tate wannabe named Bóbita. Throughout the black-and-white cinematography of the present day, where we follow Angela around and find ourselves lulled to sleep by the rhythmic movements of her hands on the steering wheel and the changing gears, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World slips in and out of the story of another Angela: The 1981 Romanian film Angela Goes On. Directed by Lucian Bratu, the older film chronicles the seemingly humdrum routine of the eponymous woman (played by Dorina Lazar) working as a taxi driver. But it was, at the time, a quietly subversive work depicting the reality of life under poverty, having been made during the oppressive and censoring regime of Communist leader Nicolae Ceaușescu. Jude considers the films of both Angelas in conversation with one another: Two films about two women doing similar jobs during drastically different political periods in the same country. Jude even slows down parts of the older film for audiences to catch what the Romanian censors at the time did not. Jude’s film is hypnotic, patient and playful, bending the rules of filmmaking, overlaying fiction on top of fiction, blending mixed media—even interjecting a surprise and charming cameo from notorious German director Uwe Boll, whom Angela convinces to appear in one of her Bóbita TikToks while he shoots an inane green screen action sequence on a backlot. In the reality depicted by Do Not Expected Too Much from the End of the World, the world will not end with a whimper or a bang, but as work accident victims idle, filming an insurance video in the rain; while the crew bickers among themselves; while the film’s PA risks crashing their car due to loss of sleep out on field work; while young people make TikToks displaying a tenuous grasp on the concept of satire; while nothing is being done to improve the lives of the people who still very much live on this planet.–Brianna Zigler
Hit Man
Release Date: TBD (Netflix)
Director: Richard Linklater
Armed with the kind of star wattage capable of outshining his co-stars, Glen Powell has cemented himself as a leading man. With the raucous comedy Hit Man (which he co-wrote with director Richard Linklater), Powell crafts a character that can ground its delightful and relentless series of plot twists. While Linklater and Powell’s last collaboration worked under the guise of an ensemble in Everybody Wants Some!!, Powell is the definitive protagonist of Hit Man. Gary (Powell) is a bumbling, lovable philosophy professor who works part-time with the undercover division of the New Orleans police department. He loves his cats, has a good relationship with his ex-wife and drives a sturdy, practical Honda Civic. When fellow detective Jasper (Austin Amelio), undercover as a hitman, is pulled from a case for misbehavior, Gary steps in, relishing the chance to immerse himself in another life, free from moral reasoning and the trappings of normality. Once he encounters the sweet and desperate Madison (Adria Arjona), who wants to rid herself of an abusive, domineering husband, his life spins into chaos. While the film weaves together colorful, tonally specific threads with relative ease, it is dominated by its romantic and comic impulses, following Madison and Gary’s relationship with unwavering focus. This requires unbidden chemistry between the two leads, a multi-hyphenate source of energy that both insulates them and propels the story forward. Powell and Arjona are up to the task, gravitating towards each other and leaning into every suggestive conversation with startling ease. Gary’s lessons in philosophy slowly coalesce with his personal experiences in Carrie Bradshaw-esque fashion. It is here that Hit Man feels somewhat shallow and underdeveloped, trying to shoehorn grander life lessons into a relatively simple relational set-up. While the ambition of such a storytelling move isn’t totally unwelcome, it does take the audience on an unnecessarily bumpy ride, forcing them to ascribe deeper meaning to a purely physical, chemistry-riddled expression of cinema. Arjona and Powell leave as the victors of this light excursion, following in the footsteps of Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck, with shades of Cary Grant coloring Powell’s playful physicality. He is spry and breezy, thriving in the informality of the silly premise he and Linklater rip from real life (Hit Man is based on a Texas Monthly article by the same man who covered Bernie’s real-life inspiration). With such charming old-school performances, Hit Man peels back the layers of genre to reveal something alive–lovely in its full-bodied animation.—Anna McKibbin
Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.
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