Alita: Battle Angel

James Cameron has been working on this drama, based on a manga series about an amnesiac cyborg, for the best part of two decades. But now he’s bogged down in a billion Avatar sequels, so Robert Rodriguez is directing instead.

Annihilation

Alex Garland’s eagerly anticipated follow-up to the quietly disturbing Ex Machina stars Natalie Portman as a biologist on an expedition into a quarantined area of the US that is rife with nasty paranormal goings-on. It’s based on Jeff VanderMeers’ award-winning Southern Reach books, and the author has called the film “extremely horrific”. Which is encouraging.

A Wrinkle in Time

Photograph: Atsushi Nishijima

Chris Pine, Zach Galifianakis and an extremely snazzy-looking Oprah Winfrey head up Ava DuVernay’s family-friendly adventure epic, in which a group of youngsters set out to rescue their father from a distant alien world. It’s Disney and it’s sci-fi, but hopefully that’s where similarities between this and Tomorrowland end.



Captive State

How humanity would react in the aftermath of extraterrestrial occupation is hardly untrodden narrative snow. But writer-director Rupert Wyatt is the man behind the first film in the Planet of the Apes reboots. So expect subtle human drama and social commentary to take precedence over explosive pyrotechnics.

Halloween

The gazillionth entry in the Halloween diaspora would hardly be cause for excitement were if not for a few interesting details. First, Jamie Lee Curtis is back, meaning this isn’t a fresh reboot, nor is it a sequel to Rob Zombie’s desperate reboot – it’s billed as the “final” entry in the original saga. Secondly, it’s directed by David Gordon Green, best known for stoner caper Pineapple Express, as well as more recent, more mature efforts such as Stronger and Joe. Potentially disastrous, but could turn out to be a pleasant surprise.

Hold the Dark

In remote Alaska, a wolf expert is called in after a number of children fall victim to grizzly lupine attacks. There he discovers a secret, and wolves soon become the least of his problems. An intriguing psychological horror from the director of Green Room, it stars Riley Keough (AKA Elvis’s Presley’s granddaughter), Jeffrey Wright and Alexander Skarsgård.

The Kid Who Would Be King

We have been waiting years for Joe Cornish’s follow-up to his enjoyable directorial debut, Attack the Block. Since then, “Cornballs” has had writing credits on Spielberg’s Tintin and Marvel’s Ant-Man, with little else getting off the ground. Here, he’s finally back in the big chair, directing his own original adventure about a group of kids taking on some kind of medieval, erm, evil. One to watch.

The Meg

What is the most fearsome type of shark to have ever lived? That would be a megalodon. What is the most fearsome type of human to have ever lived? That would be a Jason Statham. So… which would win in a fight? That’s right: in The Meg, The Stath fights a really, really massive shark. Take our money, Hollywood. You’ve earned it.

Mortal Engines

Special effects whizz Christian Rivers makes his directorial debut with this dystopian epic, based on Philip Reeve’s novels and with a screenplay by Lord of the Rings (and, unfortunately, The Hobbit) trio Peter Jackson, Philippa Boyens and Fran Walsh. Set in a post-apocalyptic steampunk world where cities are huge machines wandering the globe, fighting for resources, it definitely looks the part in the trailer. But, then, so did The Hobbit.

Mute

Alexander Skarsgård – him again – is a mute bartender living in a Blade Runner-neon Berlin, whose search for his missing girlfriend takes him on an odyssey into the city’s grimy underworld, via encounters with the likes of Paul Rudd and Justin Theroux. Warcraft and Source Code dude Duncan Jones is in charge, though this is purported to tie in somehow with Bowie Jnr’s debut, Moon.

The New Mutants

The next entry in the X-Men series leaves the increasingly nonsensical bombast of its parent series behind, choosing to dial things back into jump-scare psychological horror. Five burgeoning young mutants are held in a shady government facility, where things take a turn for the creepy.

Pacific Rim: Uprising

This sequel to 2013’s delightfully daft monster movie replaces the original’s director, Guillermo del Toro, with Steven DeKnight, of TV-show Spartacus fame. The big question is whether the giant robot-smashing chaos will suffer from the lack of Del Toro’s assured presence. John Boyega’s in the lead role.

The Predator

Shane Black starred in the original jungle blow-em-up, so the writer-director’s return to the franchise comes with a pleasing sense of symmetry. The writer-director of Iron Man 3 has the action chops to make this work. The dangling questions are whether he will align his Predator to the tense tone of the original, and whether Arnie will return to advise people to get to the chopper as only he can.



Untitled Cloverfield sequel

Retconning already-written screenplays to shoehorn them into the Cloverfield universe sounds like a terrible idea, which made 10 Cloverfield Lane one of 2016’s most pleasant surprises. This third entry in the loose saga, a sci-fi-horror originally – and still possibly – called God Particle, sees astronauts at the ISS making a nasty discovery.