Top 10 Most Anticipated Movies of 2009

So will 2009 produce anything that I go as nuts for as The Dark Knight and Wall-E? Probably not, but it’s always fun to speculate. Here’s what I’m looking forward to next year.

10 Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
Hmmm, this is familiar. I seem to remember writing something about this one last year. You know the drill. Harry Potter, most consistent film series currently running, love the books, awesome cast, and so on and so forth.

9 Green Zone
This year, Generation Kill proved that it’s not impossible to make a great film about the still-in-progress Iraq War (just very unlikely). That said, I’m very interested to see what Paul Greengrass, the man behind United 93 and the Bourne series, has cooked up. Considering what he did with 9/11, I’m confident that he’s more than equipped to handle material just as tough.

8 Public Enemies
Michael Mann’s new film about the hunt for John Dillinger, starring Johnny Depp and Christian Bale. Uh, yes please.

7 Shutter Island
Is there any need to explain why I’d be excited for a new Scorsese film? How about mentioning that it marks his fourth collaboration with Leonardo DiCaprio, a partnership that brought us The Aviator and The Departed. Yeah, I think that’ll do it.

6 Star Trek
I have a lot of respect for the original 1960’s Star Trek series as a groundbreaking and tremendously influential work of science fiction, but I’m at best lukewarm on the franchise in general, and I’m not a fan of the director, J.J. Abrams by any stretch of the imagination. So why am I excited for Star Trek? Well that trailer was pretty fantastic, and with Hollywood all franchise-crazy right now, my hope is that these movies can do what the Star Wars prequels failed with, and we’ll have a new series to look forward to every few summers.

5 The Lovely Bones
I’m a sucker for popcorn movies, and Peter Jackson is arguably the reigning king of popcorn cinema. His next film, The Lovely Bones, isn’t popcorn at all (it’s an adaptation of a novel about a young girl who is murdered and watches her family from heaven), but I’m still looking forward to seeing what the man who brought us Lord of the Rings and King Kong has up his sleeve.

4 Up
Pixar’s next film, Up seems like it has an almost Miyazaki-like vibe to it, and if that awesome trailer is any indication, the movie should be another homerun for the makers of the best animated movies in… well, pretty much ever.

3 Inglorious Basterds
2009 promises many movies that we thought would never be released, including Inglorious Basterds (no, that’s not a typo), Quentin Tarantino’s WW2 epic that I believe we first heard about sometime around the release of Pulp Fiction. Tarantino’s movies have gotten increasingly fetishistic, but if he can do for the war movie what he did for the samurai flick, then we are in for a treat.

2 Watchmen
A year ago I would’ve given a brief (yeah, probably not) primer of Watchmen for people who weren’t familiar, but things have changed in the past 12 months. I’ll just reiterate what everyone already knows. A film adaptation of the greatest comic book story of all time is finally being released in theaters (we hope), and as New York’s self-proclaimed #1 comic geek, you can be sure I will have my opening night tickets a month in advance and request that day off from work.

1 Avatar
Avatar marks the first major motion picture from director James Cameron since directing the biggest movie of all time over 10 years ago. I’m not the biggest fan of that boat movie, but Aliens? Terminator? The man is a geek-movie god. So all this alone would be enough to entice me, but the fact that the film is being made with technology that he has been developing in that decade span that’s even got guys like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas excited gives this one just enough of a push to top the greatest comic book ever written.