The forthcoming comedy Snatched gives a first taste of the strong female roles coming down the pipeline, featuring Amy Schumer and Goldie Hawn as a mother-daughter duo who get captured on a trip to South America.
Israeli actress Gal Gadot then takes the baton in the superhero film Wonder Woman, who finally gets a film all her own after just a side role in last year’s Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice.
Though Tom Cruise gets the top billing, the real star of The Mummy is Sofia Boutella, a French-Algerian actress who plays the titular mummy, a former princess seeking revenge after being buried alive.
And last but not least of the female-heavy films is Charlize Theron’s Atomic Blonde, in which she stars as a platinum blonde agent in Berlin shortly before the fall of the wall.
Originality is in famously short supply in Hollywood, and similar to last year’s slate of films around this time, the big studios have opted for safe sequels and spin-offs.
Ridley Scott’s long-running Alien franchise picks up from 2012’s Prometheus with Alien: Covenant, which stars German-Irish actor Michael Fassbender in a double role as two synthetic androids.
And there are plenty more film saga updates with the tell-tale colon in the title: Transformers: The Last Knight, Spider-Man: Homecoming and then Planet Of The Apes: Survival.
The big nostalgia experiment this time around? Baywatch, based on the 1990s television series featuring David Hasselhoff and Pamela Anderson as lifeguards on the beaches of Malibu. In the 2017 version, Zach Efron and Dwayne Johnson don the series’ famous red swimsuits. – dpa/Barbara Munker
