Once upon a time, the talking pictures were a place people would go to escape into a story: Tales of adventure and tragedy and comedy that had come to life on screen, told by fellow humans — cowboys and villians, gangsters and heroes. They may not have been just like us, but we could relate to them, root for them, and feel for them; our co-passengers in the crazy ride we call life.
Today, the characters in our stories are glorified punctuation points and ground meat. Instead of creating stories to enrich the lives of moviegoers, studios are waiting to see what audiences like and will pay for and creating stories around that. After hearing news of the Angry Birds movie, we bring you all the unnecessary films coming to theaters soon.
Angry Birds
On Friday, Sony Pictures dropped the trailer for Angry Birds, the animated movie based on the video game about — you guessed it — birds who have a hard time controlling their temper. At nearly a year out from the May 2016 release date, we’ve got several months to look forward to subsequent trailers, billboards, and nonstop cross-promotions.
Untitled Emoji Movie
I guess Sony Pictures believes the only way to get people to turn off their phones is to take the contents of their phone and project them onto a giant screen. The studio won a bidding war this summer to create an animated adventure starring tiny smiley faces and steaming piles of poop.
Warcraft
Warcraft is a popular fantasy video game franchise, and Universal is counting on its devoted fan base to shell out tickets to the $100 million movie. It opens on June 10, 2016.
Point Break
We could spend all day bemoaning the movie industry’s lazy obsession with rebooting and franchising, but we’ve singled out the Point Break reboot — which is NOT directed by Kathryn Bigelow and co-stars a couple of randos who are NOT Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swazye — because it looks particularly terrible and a complete waste of everyone’s time and money. Watch the trailer, you’ll agree.
![Point Break - Official Trailer [HD]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ncvFAm4kYCo/hqdefault.jpg)
Get Smurfy
The third installment of Sony’s Smurf series that first hit theaters in 2011, Get Smurfy was greenlit just two weeks after production started on The Smurfs 2. These movies do inexplicably well at the box office, so the franchise will probably outlive us all. Like Gargoyle.
Barbie
Admittedly, we really don’t know what to expect from this live-action Barbiemovie from Juno and Young Adult screenwriter Diablo Cody. But we know we don’t need any more Barbie in this world.
Sausage Party
I can guarantee that one of the writers of this movie (which include Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg) got lost in the meat aisle at the supermarket when he was super stoned. Described as “one sausage’s quest to discover the truth about his existence,” the computer-animated movie will open in 2016.