8 movies to watch instead of the ones that won't be released this holiday season

(Image credit: Illustrated | IMP Awards)

published 27 November 2020

With Thanksgiving around the corner, one would expect the TV to be crowded with holiday movie trailers, for billboards to be advertising Oscar hopefuls, and for every commercial break on the radio to have dramatic music hyping blockbusters in theaters now.

But this year, the TVs and radios are silent, and the billboards bare. Welcome to the movie season that wasn't.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Luckily, there are 35 other movies in the Godzilla franchise to watch instead, including plenty of "Godzilla versus …" combinations. Kaiju experts recommend skipping the obvious choice here, 1963's King Kong vs. Godzilla, which "features a janky-looking Kong, a plodding story, and lackluster fight scenes (to say nothing of the cringe-y sight of Japanese actors in blackface depicting the natives of Kong's island)," Vulture writes. Instead opt for Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, which includes the first appearance of Godzilla's robotic foe. While the special effects are endearingly dated, consider it research: Godzilla: King of the Monsters teased the potential appearance of Mechagodzilla in Godzilla vs. Kong with a line in the credits that mentions a "mechanized giant" being assembled on Skull Island.

Director Reinaldo Marcus Green was aiming to break the tennis movie curse this year with King Richard, a biopic about Venus and Serena Williams' father and coach, Richard Williams (played by Will Smith). Unfortunately, this one is not an easy movie to find a substitute for — to quote the legendary coach Nick Bollettieri, who was asked by Vanity Fair about the best tennis movies, "If I'm totally honest, there are none."

In fact, the best option might be the 2018 Showtime documentary Love Means Zero, which is about Bollettieri. While Bollettieri also had a hand in coaching the Williams sisters (he refers to them as "my Venus" and "my Serena"), Love Means Zero focuses primarily on his relationship with Andre Agassi, and how he threw it all away. "As a piece of tennis lore, Love Means Zero is absolutely vital," wrote Indiewire.

The hype is real for Raya and the Last Dragon, an original high fantasy story set in the Southeast Asia-inspired world of Kumandra. In it, Raya (voiced by Kelly Marie Tran), a warrior, must find the last dragon (Awkwafina) in order to save the realm from monsters. Disney opted against a straight-to-streaming option with Raya, like it'd pursued with Mulan, so if risking your life to see The Croods sequel isn't appealing, that means there are no other options for a new animated movie over Thanksgiving weekend.

Instead, try Ne Zha on Netflix (note that while the movie is originally in Mandarin, Netflix offers the option of dubbing the film in English in case kiddos want to avoid subtitles). The film is based on a character from Chinese mythology, an infant named Ne Zha who is the incarnation of the "Demon Orb," destined to be struck dead by lightning when he turns three — think a demonic, cursed Boss Baby. Ne Zha is the highest-grossing non-U.S. animated film in history, and while it might not be quite as lovely and lyrical as Raya (for something more along those lines, fire up HBO Max for Princess Mononoke), it promises its own sort of adventure.

Sadly, it will be 10 more months before we get to watch Timothée Chalamet, Oscar Isaac, Jason Momoa, and Zendaya in the ensemble adaptation of Frank Herbert's hugely-influential 1965 sci-fi novel, Dune. But just be happy you'll one day be able to watch it at all — which is sadly not the case for the adaptation once dreamed up by the psychedelic cult director Alejandro Jodorowsky, and the subject of a 2014 documentary about his unsuccessful attempt to make the movie, Jodorowsky's Dune.

"In 1975, having created controversy with his films Fando y Lis and El Topo, Jodorowsky threw himself headlong into making Dune, fired by messianic passion, unbridled energy, and a vision for cinema that, along with the psychedelics being ingested at the time, he hoped would change mass consciousness forever," The Washington Post wrote in its review of the documentary, calling the phantom project perhaps "the greatest movie never made."

But if you prefer snapping and leaping gangsters over fidelity to Shakespeare's script, then Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet from 1996 gets a little closer to what you're looking for. While Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes speak in Shakespeare's original dialogue, everything else is modern, from the soundtrack to the costumes (plus young DiCaprio was kind of the Elgort of his day). Already seen it, or perhaps Luhrmann's zany style is not your thing? Don't worry: there are plenty of other options that could fit the bill.

Sisters of a different sort star in The Innocents, which is set in Poland in the early days after the end of the war. Mathilde Beaulieu, a doctor for the French Red Cross, travels to work at a Benedictine convent, where she discovers that a number of the nuns are on the verge of giving birth. Like The Nightingale, it is a film about the cost of war on women, as told by a woman director. Both movies likewise examine "strong, brave women protecting each other and doing what they must to survive."

2020 marked the first time since 2014 that there wasn't scheduled to be a new Star Wars movie in theaters, and Chris Pratt had been set to fill the sci-fi void this Christmas with The Tomorrow War before, well, you know. The movie is about a future war in which scientists develop the technology to draft soldiers from the past in order to fend off an alien invasion, but will now come out during the height of the crowded 2021 summer movie season.

If you still want a big time-travel-y action movie to watch over Christmas, consider Christopher Nolan's Tenet instead. The film controversially came out in theaters this summer after multiple pandemic delays, but failed to draw crowds back to the cinema. Now Warner Bros. has decided to finally allow people to watch the movie on-demand safely at home, with Tenet set to be digitally released on Dec. 15.

Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.

Subscribe to The Week

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

Sign up for Today's Best Articles in your inbox