San Andreas

How do you top destroying the entire West Coast of the United States in an earthquake? (That wasn’t a rhetorical question. The guys who’ve been hired to write a sequel to San Andreas need to figure out a way to top destroying the entire West Coast and they’re looking for ideas...

In news that should surprise absolutely no one, the massive disaster movie starring Dwayne Johnson stomped all over the box office this weekend, effortlessly topping the top 10. San Andreas may not have matched flashier, more high concept “CGI buildings fall down” adventures like The Day After Tomorrow and 2012, but it has proven that audiences will still flock to mass destruction like no one’s bu

What if there was a place, a secret place where nothing was impossible? How would you introduce people to that place? For Tomorrowland director Brad Bird, the answer to that question was a show-stopping, six-minute unbroken take that follows its heroine as she explores this magical wonderland for the first time. She watches men in jetpacks zoom overhead, rides a floating monorail, and nearly accepts an invitation to board a rocket ship headed for outer space — until her invite runs out of juice and she’s returned home.

The classics of this genre featured danger and destruction on a scale a guy could wrap his head around; a hijacked airplane, a skyscraper on fire, a capsized ocean liner filling with water. But when you live by spectacle, you die by it too. And so the disasters got bigger and bigger, one movie trying to top the next, until it became an arms race of planetary devastation. One movie blows up the White House, the next one washes it away in a tidal wave. Where do you go from there? An exploding tidal wave? At this point, if your disaster movie isn’t eradicating a large portion of the globe, don’t even waste your time.

It’s The Rock versus The Fault this week, as San Andreas rumbles into movie theaters across the country. The film stars Dwayne Johnson as Chief Ray Gaines, a helicopter rescue pilot with the Los Angeles Fire Department; after Southern California is decimated by “The Big One,” Gaines and his ex-wife (Carla Gugino) must travel to San Francisco to find and save their daughter (Alexandra Daddario). Along the way, many buildings will topple, many cracks will rip the Earth apart, and many extras will die. It’s a disaster movie; that’s what happens.

I know San Andreas is a dark, serious disaster movie about a massive earthquake that decimates most of the West Coast, but c’mon; shouldn’t they have called it That Fault’s A’Rocking? It stars The Rock! It’s the San Andreas fault! It’s rocking! Because the earthquake and he’s Dwayne “The Rock” Johnsyou know what nevermind, let’s just move on.

Temperatures are getting warmer, days are getting longer and the movies are getting bigger. Yep, summer is here and it’s brought with it one of the most jam-packed movie schedules in years. From superhero movies and post-apocalypitc adventures to rom-coms and animated family flicks, the summer of 2015 has something for everyone. In fact, it may have too much of everything for everyone. You are going to be spending a lot of time in movie theaters over the next three months. And with that, these are the 25 movies you have to have on your radar this summer. Read this list. Study it. Watch the trailers. Create a game plan. Oh, and stay hydrated. Living on popcorn is thirsty business.

It’s been a while since we had a really good disaster movie. Roland Emmerich was the last guy to really push the genre forward, but after freezing and then destroying the entire planet (in The Day After Tomorrow and 2012, respectively) there’s not really a lot of ground left to cover (and demolish). Next summer’s San Andreas will attempt to revive the disaster movie by juicing up an old favorite: the earthquake. This version, directed by Journey 2: The Mysterious Island’s Brad Peyton, features a tremor so huge it encompasses all of California from Los Angeles to San Francisco. It’s so big, Paul Giamatti gravely intones, it can even be felt on the East Coast. That’s a big quake.

If you’ve been to the movie theater in the last couple years — and you like to show up early — then you’ve surely noticed one of the most pervasive and tired trends in modern Hollywood: The use of depressing cover versions of famous songs in movie trailers. It started with one brilliantly innovative coming attraction, but quickly became something of an industry standard; nearly every studio tentpole’s first teaser (and sometimes the full trailer that follows) is scored by some kind of gloomy cover of a tune everyone knows. To prove just how played out this gimmick is, ScreenCrush assembled a list of fifteen examples from the last five years. Watch ’em and weep (because these trailers are so very sad):