24 Movies We're Lining Up for in 2015

The Wedding Ringer (Jan. 16)

A dorky groom (Josh Gad) hires a slick pro (Kevin Hart) to be his best man. Think Wedding Crashers meets Hitch. The off-screen antics matched the tone of the movie. ''I took Josh to a black nightclub and he enjoyed himself thoroughly,'' says Hart. ''I had him spend a thousand ones on exotic dancers.'' Gad confirms, ''Kevin taught me the art of wasting money as quickly as possible. I wanted to pocket the money and send my child to a good school.'' —Keith Staskiewicz

Focus (Feb. 27)

Part crime saga, part romantic comedy, Will Smith and The Wolf of Wall Street's Margot Robbie costar in Focus as a scam artist and apprentice who start to fall for each other while perpetrating their frauds...or do they? ''He comes from a place where emotion, compassion, sympathy and trust are tools of the trade to be exploited,'' says Glenn Ficarra, who wrote and directed the film with filmmaking partner John Requa (Crazy, Stupid, Love). Requa adds, ''We thought it would be fun to tell a love story in this world of con artists, where you never know where the truth lies.'' Just like love among everyone else, right? —Anthony Breznican

Chappie (March 6)

The sad thing about artificial intelligence, French philosopher Jean Baudrillard once remarked, is that it lacks artifice and therefore any real intelligence. But try telling that to the bling-wearing, gangsta-limping robot hero of the upcoming sci-fi thriller Chappie. Engineered as a security drone for Johannesburg's militarized police force in a crumbling, not-so-distant-future South Africa, the bipedal technocreation (played via performance capture by District 9's Sharlto Copley) is experimentally rebooted by an idealistic scientist (Slumdog Millionaire's Dev Patel) to feel and think for itself, becoming a kind of bulletproof Pinocchio in the process. For co-writer/director Neill Blomkamp (District 9, Elysium), the film functions less as a glimpse into the future than a ''weird coming-of-age story.'' He explains, ''It's an exploration into innocence—about this [created] being that wants the affection of his parents, but he's split between two sets of parents.... He's a robot that's more human than the human beings are.'' —Chris Lee

In the Heart of the Sea (March 13)

Chris Hemsworth trades in his hammer for a whaler's harpoon in Ron Howard's In the Heart of the Sea, a period action drama based on Nathaniel Philbrick's award-winning book of the same name, which told the true story of an 1820 shipwreck that stranded sailors in the ocean for 90 days—and inspired Moby-Dick. Brendan Gleeson portrays an Essex sailor who, three decades after the shipwreck, recounts his whale of a tale to none other than Melville himself (Skyfall's Ben Whishaw). Tom Holland plays the younger Gleeson, while Benjamin Walker is the captain of the Essex, who clashes with his much more experienced deputy (Hemsworth).

It was Hemsworth who asked his Rush director to come aboard, though Howard, a self-proclaimed ''pale-skinned redhead'' had misgivings. ''But I just know there's great drama out there. I thought, 'Well, this is my time to finally go to sea.''' He has a feeling others won't feel the same after seeing Sea: ''I don't think anyone wants to get on a whaling ship after this movie.'' —Clark Collis

Insurgent (March 20)

Society is heading for war in the sequel to Divergent, which finds Tris (Shailene Woodley) and Four (Theo James) continuing to lead the resistance against the corrupt government. Evil mastermind Jeanine (Kate Winslet) wants to wipe out Tris and her kind, and according to Woodley, the plot takes some turns away from Veronica Roth's book. ''There's a lot people won't expect,'' she says. The amped-up action meant Woodley got to spend quality time in a harness, suspended in midair. ''It pinches and it's uncomfortable, but you feel like you're Tinker Bell or Peter Pan.'' —Sara Vilkomerson

Furious 7 (April 3)

Cars parachute out of planes, Jason Statham plays the new villain, James Wan (Saw) directs, and things are getting darker for the auto-action franchise. ''Our characters are going into a shadow world beyond what they could have ever imagined,'' says star and producer Vin Diesel. —Darren Franich

Ex Machina (April 10)

The science-fiction thriller follows a low-level computer coder (Unbroken's Domhnall Gleeson) working for a Google-like Internet search engine who wins a competition to spend a week at an Alaskan retreat with the company's eccentric but brilliant CEO (Oscar Isaac). Expecting a promotion, the younger man is instead introduced to Ava (Anna Karenina's Alicia Vikander), a sentient AI whose physical beauty is undimmed by ''her'' visible robot machinery. And he must conduct a Turing test, the complex analysis measuring a machine's ability to demonstrate intelligent human behavior, while wrestling with his own conflicted romantic longing for the humanoid. According to director Alex Garland (the novelist-screenwriter responsible for such dystopian future-set films as 28 Days Later and Sunshine), the movie addresses the type of God complex that necessarily accompanies creating artificial life and also tweaks certain hard-and-fast rules governing human attraction. ''The film is saying, 'Here is a female-looking robot. A very beautiful machine. But it is a machine,' ''Garland says. ''And then it puts the viewer through the experience of the character in the film, where you become increasingly blind to that fact.'' —Chris Lee

Mad Max: Fury Road (May 15)

Let's call it a meet-angry. When Mad Max (Tom Hardy) first encounters the imposing Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) in Fury Road, the two engage in a brutal brawl. They have a common enemy in a warlord (who counts Nicholas Hoult's Nux as a devotee) but won't join forces until they have it out in the dirt. ''This is not just two people standing there punching each other,'' says writer-director George Miller. ''This is a question of which one of them is going to survive.'' Though Miller won't say who wins, it's clear he holds Furiosa in high regard. One day during production, he says, ''Charlize was driving the war rig back to base camp, and I was sitting in the cabin behind her. I remember thinking, 'She is the Imperator, and if this was a real wasteland and we were at war, I'd be really happy she's on our side.''' —Nicole Sperling

Avengers: Age of Ultron (May 1)

Joss Whedon, returning writer-director on Avengers: Age of Ultron, sees the film's titular indestructible robotic villain with limitless intelligence and a pronounced mean streak as our era's ''new Frankenstein myth. We create something in our own image and the thing turns on us. It has that pain of 'Well, why was I made? I want to kill Daddy.''' In Ultron's case, that Oedipus complex finds its outlet in Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark. The billionaire genius/playboy industrialist character who moonlights as Iron Man builds Ultron (performed and voiced by James Spader) as a superhero substitute to protect and serve humankind from otherworldly peril. Complications arise, however, when the self-replicating, eight-foot-tall battle-bot decides man is his own worst enemy and must be stopped. (Whedon used the parent-killing baby in Ray Bradbury's story ''The Small Assassin'' as a reference.) ''I don't remember seeing an artificial-intelligence movie where the robot is bonkers—the most emotionally unstable person in the film—and who has the knowledge of 3,000 years of recorded history and who is a pouty teen, all at the same time,'' Whedon says. —Chris Lee

Tomorrowland (May 22)

All of George Clooney's tomorrows are now yesterdays. In the film directed by Brad Bird (Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol), Clooney's Frank Walker is an exile from a realm known as Tomorrowland who becomes the reluctant guide for a young woman (Under the Dome's Britt Robertson). ''Something has happened in this place,'' says Damon Lindelof (World War Z), who created the story with EW critic Jeff Jensen. ''Determining why it's been kept a secret, and why Frank Walker is living here instead of there, is all in the spine of our adventure.'' —Anthony Breznican

Jurassic World (June 15)

Set 22 years after Steven Spielberg's original film, Jurassic World presents a swank new version of the dino amusement park. The place is thriving, but in an effort to create more buzz, scientists breed a ferocious hybrid dinosaur that brings death, destruction, and lots of freaked-out, running-for-their-lives humans. ''There are dinosaurs and there's the other—this thing that is not one of them, that is not of them,'' says director Colin Trevorrow (Safety Not Guaranteed). Fresh off his blockbuster turn in Guardians of the Galaxy, Chris Pratt plays a researcher who teams up with the park's operations manager (Bryce Dallas Howard) to stop the giant beast. ''I grew up loving Jurassic Park and these epic spectacles,'' he says. ''I saw [the first one] opening night in the theater. It was a huge moment for me.'' Jurassic World may well prove to be another. —Tim Stack

Inside Out (June 19)

Directed by Pete Docter, Pixar's latest is the story of a tween girl's emotions. Joy (voiced by Amy Poehler) is the leader, and she struggles to keep the gang in line when the girl starts a new school. Docter likens the feelings to another iconic crew: ''It's our own version of the Seven Dwarfs.'' —Nina Terrero

Ted 2 (June 26)

Everyone's favorite foulmouthed teddy bear is back! Seth MacFarlane won't reveal plot details, but does confirm that we won't see any plush additions to Ted's entourage. ''It's basically the way we treated Stewie in Family Guy,'' the co-writer/director says. ''He's the only one of his kind who can talk.'' —Keith Staskiewicz

Terminator: Genisys (July 1)

In Genisys, an army of marauding humanoids beams in from the future determined to eliminate a ragtag band of rebel humans led by John Connor (Dawn of the Planet of the Apes star Jason Clarke), Kyle Reese (Divergent's Jai Courtney), and Connor's warrior future-mother, Sarah (Game of Thrones' Emilia Clarke). The $170 million sci-fi epic's plot arc represents a bombastic dramatization of the Technological Singularity—the tipping point at which, some academics believe, AI will exceed human control and overrun our civilization.

That future doesn't seem that sci-fi anymore, in our era of self-driving cars and automated iPhone conversations. Even such acclaimed theorists as Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, respectively, decry artificial intelligence as ''our biggest existential threat'' and warn it could ''spell the end of the human race.'' All of which fueled Genisys producer David Ellison's decision to relaunch the Terminator franchise. ''That dividing line between man and machine has never been closer,'' he says. ''The Singularity feels like it's not that far off.'' —Chris Lee, with additional reporting by Nicole Sperling

Pan (July 24)

Hollywood's latest spin on J.M. Barrie's tale recasts the Neverland classic as an origin story. Peter (Levi Miller) and Hook (Garrett Hedlund) are now partners who, along with Rooney Mara's Tiger Lily, try to escape the nefarious pirate Blackbeard, played by a devilish Hugh Jackman. ''Hook's less of a villain in this; he just wants to get home,'' says Hedlund, whose character is a dashing Errol Flynn type. ''But he's also quite the manipulator, a blooming anarchist.'' We're, um, hooked. —Keith Staskiewicz

Everest (Sept. 18)

The snowcapped thriller stars Jason Clarke and Jake Gyllenhaal as guides leading the treacherous 1996 expedition to Mount Everest, where a blizzard killed eight people. The movie shot in Italy's Dolomite mountain range, at Everest itself, and in a London studio that offered slightly less hostile conditions. ''You're blowing salt in the face of the actors, who are high up and roped in,'' says director Baltasar Kormákur (Contraband). ''The danger kept going even inside.'' —Nicole Sperling

The Walk (Oct. 2)

Joseph Gordon-Levitt performs a high-wire act (literally) in The Walk, starring as Philippe Petit, the French high-wire-walking daredevil who strung a cable between the World Trade Center's two 110-story skyscrapers in 1974 and walked across it, 1,350 feet above Manhattan. ''Re-creating the Twin Towers in a photo-real way—only movies can do that,'' says Robert Zemeckis (Flight). ''The towers are definitely characters in the movie, and Philippe loved them and spoke to them as if they were partners, accomplices, as if they were living, breathing things.''

The production built replicas of the rooftops on a stage in Montreal. The dawning sky, the mist and dust, the tiny cityscape below were all ''digital extensions,'' as Zemeckis puts it. What's not CG is the man on the cable. Gordon-Levitt did have a safety rig, but he trained with Petit to balance without falling. During the actual stunt, Petit, who was the subject of the Oscar-winning 2008 documentary Man on Wire, walked between the towers for about 45 minutes, putting on an awesome show. During shooting, Gordon-Levitt would balance for hours. ''When Joe was walking on the wire, it was 12 feet off the ground,'' Zemeckis says. ''We had to be able to get the cameras under it and over it. You usually only get to see a wire walker by looking up, but our camera is looking down, so everyone gets that magnificent sense of vertigo.'' —Anthony Breznican

The Jungle Book (Oct. 9)

Rudyard Kipling's 19th-century tale of a boy raised by wolves has been adapted more than a dozen times, but Walt Disney's 1967 animated musical remains the gold standard. Now director Jon Favreau (Iron Man) is giving it a 21st-century tech update (note the image above is concept art, not from the film itself). Newcomer Neel Sethi plays Mowgli, and there's a lot riding on those young shoulders. Not only does he do his own tree climbing—''A 10-year-old in a loincloth is hard to double with a stuntman,'' Favreau says—but he's also the only live-action actor in a performance-capture spectacle of photo-realistic animals, including Baloo (Bill Murray), King Louie (Christopher Walken), and Rakcha, the mother wolf (Lupita Nyong'o). Oh, and yes, Murray is singing ''The Bare Necessities.'' —Nicole Sperling

Crimson Peak (Oct. 16)

Guillermo del Toro (Pacific Rim) wants his next movie to bring horror back to its gnarled, twisted roots. ''It's very much in an old mold with a little bit of extra depravity and brutality sprinkled in,'' says the director, who found inspiration in such classic gothic films as The Innocents and Rebecca. Set in the 19th century, the film stars Mia Wasikowska (Alice in Wonderland) as a new bride who discovers that her husband (Tom Hiddleston) is a tad...off. Jessica Chastain (pictured above) plays her sister-in-law, a role that turned out to be more intense than she anticipated. ''It was really draining, emotionally and spiritually,'' says Chastain. ''The experience took more out of me than anything I'd ever done. When I finished I had to take some time off.'' For an actress who's been averaging three movies a year—and 2015 is no exception—that's saying something. —Keith Staskiewicz

Steven Spielberg's Cold War Spy Thriller (Oct. 16)

Tom Hanks is James Donovan, the true-life lawyer who worked with the CIA to negotiate the release of Francis Gary Powers, a U.S. pilot shot down over Soviet airspace in 1960 while piloting a U-2 spy plane. ''This is one of the more astonishing stories about the Cold War I'd ever heard,'' says Spielberg. ''James Donovan is a hero to me, and Tom made him so completely accessible. I've always wanted to make a spy movie, and this is that and then some.'' —Anthony Breznican

SPECTRE (Nov. 6)

The 24th Bond installment pits 007 against a foe introduced in 1962's Dr. No: evil global terrorist conglomerate SPECTRE. Daniel Craig is back, of course, and joining him are director Sam Mendes (returning after Skyfall) and Christoph Waltz, who turns up as the mysterious villain Oberhauser. —Chris Lee

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 2 (Nov. 20)

What awaits Katniss in the final chapter? Taking down President Snow. That means plenty of action, but for Julianne Moore, who returns as rebel ally Alma Coin, there's another side to these films. ''They are personal stories about a young woman growing up, but with an incredible political message,'' Moore says. —Nicole Sperling

Star Wars: The Force Awakens (Dec. 18)

Although we've only seen flashes of actual footage from next December's journey into that other universe, it's interesting to note that director J.J. Abrams chose to introduce the first new characters in moments of isolation and desperation. Consider John Boyega as Finn, the scared, sweaty stormtrooper trying to make an escape in the desert. Or Daisy Ridley's Rey, riding solo (no pun intended) in her Taser-shaped speeder across a similarly blighted landscape. Yes, Oscar Isaac's Poe Dameron is flying his X-wing in formation with the rest of his squad, but life in those cockpits can be solitary. These new ships don't even appear to include the R2-D2-style astromech robots the previous models used as co-pilots. Even BB-8, the adorable ball droid, is rolling across the desert on its own. Then there is Kylo Ren, the mysterious cloaked figure staggering through the woods on a snowy evening before igniting his fiery three-pronged lightsaber. Clearly a villain and identified in the trailer as standing for ''the dark side'' in this new awakening, he is possibly the shadow version of Luke Skywalker from the original trilogy—the nobody who rises from nothing and nowhere to topple the powers that be. That would certainly mirror contemporary anxieties: We are less fearful of evil empires; what terrifies us now is the angry loner with a tricked-out weapon.

Mark Hamill, who first appeared on screen as the space cowboy 37 years ago, admits that the emotion of being back in the Star Wars galaxy can be overwhelming at times. ''Part of the experience of [Star Wars] in my life was coming down from [it], putting it behind me. We had a beginning, a middle, and an end. And I certainly, in a million years, never expected to return.''' This time around, behind the scenes, Hamill tried to make the most of being reunited with his former costars, including Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia and Harrison Ford as Han Solo, as well as getting to know the new generation of actors. ''It's kind of like Scrooge on Christmas morning,'' Hamill says.'' 'Oh my God, this time I'm going to appreciate it in a way I wasn't able to as a young man.''' We can't be sure what destiny awaits Luke until the Dec. 18 release. But what we do know for sure is, if he's back with his old friends, there's always a new hope. —Anthony Breznican

Sisters (Dec. 18)

You've seen teenagers wreck their parents' houses with raging benders. But in Sisters, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler do it as fully grown adults. ''People our age need a hardcore house party more than a 17-year-old,'' says Fey. ''What are they cutting loose from?'' The comic duo costar as estranged sisters who throw one last bash before their parents sell their childhood home. ''We both get to go pretty crazy,'' says Poehler, who, incidentally, is looking forward to a fierce box office showdown come next December. ''We said we'd only do the movie if it opened against Star Wars,'' she says. ''We're not scared. It's what gets us up in the morning: We are going to f---ing crush Star Wars.'' —Sara Vilkomerson