2020 was far from a banner year for American moviegoing for a couple obvious reasons: the pandemic closed theaters and prompted studios to delay the majority of their projects, and the few theatrical releases (Tenet, The New Mutants) didn’t have the strength to bring audiences back to cinemas before widespread vaccinations. 2021 had the opposite problem: the backlog of delayed tentpoles combined with the first wave of new movies produced during the pandemic created a tidal wave of blockbusters — it felt as though a new 150 million dollar franchise movie was coming out every weekend, despite audiences’ continued hesitance to return to the cinema.
But now that we’re past the hegemonic holiday season reign of Spider-Man: No Way Home, first-run theaters have the strongest variety of wide releases since the pandemic began — and honestly, it’s a more eclectic lineup than the last few years before the pandemic, too. Mid-budget genre movies are having a mini-renaissance this spring, and they’re a welcome breath of fresh air in the pause between tentpoles. Most of them make great use of their stars’ strengths, and prove that superheroes aren’t the only viable subjects for theatrical entertainment.
Perhaps the most encouraging development of the season is the reactivation of multiple comedy subgenres that have long laid dormant. Marry Me, starring Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson, is one of the most prominent theatrical romantic comedies in the last ten years. Aside from a few outliers (Crazy Rich Asians, Trainwreck), our sweetest subgenre has been largely relegated to lower-budget, starless streaming releases for the past decade, so seeing a rom-com titan like Lopez return to form — in a movie that thoughtfully grapples with her public image, no less — is a genuine treat. It’s also refreshing to watch two charismatic, middle-aged performers navigate a low-stakes love story. Meanwhile, Jackass Forever is effortlessly demonstrating that there’s still a significant market for big-screen slapstick comedy, the Foo Fighters are upholding theatrical horror-comedy fusion with Studio 666, and Dog, starring and co-directed by Channing Tatum, revives two movie traditions that we haven’t seen in cinemas for a while: the road trip drama and the live-action animal adventure-comedy (with an actual dog!).
There’s also a resurgence of more serious genre fare aimed squarely at older audiences. Joe Wright’s period musical drama Cyrano is a gorgeous, tragic expression of romantic yearning and a magnificent star vehicle for Peter Dinklage. It integrates intimate songs (written by The National) into its bittersweet story, and boasts some of the loveliest period aesthetics in recent memory, with elegant costumes, dazzling sets, and sublimely soft lighting. Meanwhile, Kenneth Branagh delivers another thoroughly-engaging old-fashioned murder mystery with Death on the Nile. Branagh gives a ridiculously magnetic performance as Agatha Christie’s mustachioed investigator Hercule Poirot — full of bottled-up rage and soft curiosity in equal measure. His animated expressions and vaguely Belgian accent are absolutely transfixing.
Even this month’s big smashy action movies seem like they’re from a bygone era. February’s biggest hit Uncharted is a somewhat paint-by-numbers adventure movie, hitting all the genre’s typical beats without much narrative or technical intrigue, but it’s pretty fun when it allows its stars to do their thing (Tom Holland’s thing is precise, athletic stunt work; Mark Wahlberg’s is aggressive, meatheaded ribbing). It’s a globetrotting treasure hunt that falls somewhere between the spirits of National Treasure and Mission Impossible with a couple of solid setpieces. Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, 2012) destroys the planet once again with his latest disaster film, Moonfall, starring Patrick Wilson, Halle Berry, and John Bradley. It bursts at the seams with wild CGI spectacle, goofy one-liners, and admirably ambitious sci-fi existentialism, making it one of the most refreshingly earnest action extravaganzas of the last several years. Both Uncharted and Moonfall have sizable budgets, but they seem much more like blockbusters from the late-’90s and early-’00s thanks to their zippy simplicity and almost-original concepts (Uncharted is based on a PlayStation game series, but most audiences probably either don’t know or don’t care).
Academy Awards nominations have also given theatrical re-expansions to several holiday holdovers: Steven Spielberg’s magnificent musical West Side Story, Paul Thomas Anderson’s coming-of-age dramedy Licorice Pizza, Disney’s charmingly-animated Encanto, and Guillermo del Toro’s noir Nightmare Alley are all still playing in many cinemas.
The next couple months look as though they’ll continue this eclectic mid-budget renaissance as well. In March, we’re getting a number of star-driven genre-benders: adventure-romantic-comedy The Lost City (with Sandra Bullock, Channing Tatum, and Brad Pitt), multiversal sci-fi-action-comedy Everything Everywhere All At Once (with Michelle Yeoh and Jamie Lee Curtis), and Guy Ritchie’s spy comedy Operation Fortune (with Jason Statham, Hugh Grant, and Aubrey Plaza). Even The Batman is looking to distance itself from typical superhero fare, with a smaller budget and a focus on the character’s mystery and noir influences. April will bring more midsize genre movies: Robert Eggers’ viking thriller The Northman, Michael Bay’s actioner Ambulance, and meta-action-comedy The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, starring Nicolas Cage as himself.
In the wake of mega-franchise blockbuster dominance and pandemic-induced volatility, spring 2022 has provided the most variety at first-run American cinemas in years. Few of these movies are masterpieces, but they’re all solid, diverting genre exercises, and they’ve collectively restored the simple pleasure of having to choose which kind of movie you want to see on the big screen. I can’t remember the last time going to the movies felt this normal — and after two exhaustingly abnormal years, normal feels amazing.