Thanks to omicron, it’s not easy these days to find soothsayers to say the sooth and take an educated guess on our collective near-futures. As one Twitter wag suggested, we really should put Netflix in charge of the pandemic, because Netflix rarely renews anything for a third year.
We know this much, film-wise: In a variety of release and platform patterns, dozens of new movies will try their luck in early 2022. Here are 10. For the record (though of course one never knows about “Downton Abbey”) none of these involve the multiverse explored recently by “Spider-Man: No Way Home” and to be continued in May, outside our winter-preview parameters, in “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.”
All dates and theatrical/streaming release plans subject to change.
“Scream,” from Jan. 14: The pleasant if corpse-strewn town of Woodsboro, Calif., says hello to a reboot of the infamous “Ghostface” slasher in this continuation of the “Scream” franchise. Welcome back to Neve Campbell, David Arquette and Courteney Cox, whose characters all have a much better chance at survival than the teens and 20-somethings on board this time.
“Moonfall,” from Feb. 4: In my world, there’s never a wrong time for another hunk of Roland Emmerich disaster-movie cheese. The schlockmeister behind “The Day After Tomorrow” and many others co-writes and directs a tale best described — in advance, anyway — by the production company’s marketing materials: “A mysterious force knocks the Moon from its orbit around Earth and sends it hurtling on a collision course with life as we know it.” Simple, succinct, apocalyptic. Featuring Halle Berry, Patrick Wilson, Michael Pena and Donald Sutherland.