(AP) - After more than a year of uncertainty and ever-fluctuating release schedules, there will be a summer movie season. The blockbusters are back. The smell of popcorn is in the air.
Summer movies have always been stuffed with calamity and cataclysm, but this year, the existential threat is also off-screen. The pandemic has brought extensive changes for the movies, which have clung to life the last 14 months mainly on small screens. Can moviegoing be resuscitated? This summer will be a profound test of survival.
But, for us at least, absence has only made our moviegoing hearts grow fonder. Here are a couple of the things we’re looking forward to this summer at the movies.
SITTING IN THE DARK WITH STRANGERS
Please, please, please silence my phone. And while you're at it, burn my couch and toss my laptop in the ocean. Dim the lights. Light the screen. Our movie experiences these past 14 months have been isolated, muffled and downsized. As good as many of the movies have been, they've all been missing something that you can't get without a packed house and a big screen. That's where the movies live, and where we surrender
MOVIE TRAILERS
It may sound silly since they are advertisements, but I’m really excited about watching trailers on the big screen again. Even though they’re so, so accessible everywhere now, there’s really nothing like seeing them in a theater and part of it is simply because you don’t know what’s coming. I still remember the thrill of seeing the Lucasfilm logo and realizing that we were about to watch that first “The Phantom Menace” trailer. Some of the movies I went on to like and some I didn’t, but I will always love the trailers.