The 10 Best Summer Movie Previews of 2008
by Brian Tallerico

5. Hancock
"You save people's lives every day. People should love you."
This story of an "ordinary hero" has been kicking around Hollywood for over a decade. In fact, the film used to be a more dramatic look at the personal life of a superhero. Tony Scott, Michael Mann, Jonathan Mostow, and Gabriele Muccino have all taken a brief seat in the director's chair at one time or another when it was called Tonight, He Comes. Mann's version would have been interestingly cool, but now the film has been turned into a summer blockbuster and the preview clearly plays up the skills of the best action/comedy actor on the scene, Will Smith. Co-written by the awesome Vince Gilligan (The X-Files, Breaking Bad) and directed by Peter Berg (The Kingdom), Hancock could be the rare original summer screenplay that works. Think about it - a blockbuster that's not based on familiar source material or a sequel to another film? That happens only a couple of times a year, if we're lucky.

4. Speed Racer
"He's going to be the best, if they don't destroy him first."
We can't get enough of this preview for the simple reason that there's NO WAY this should be just another "okay" movie. Just ten seconds of the clip tells you that it's a daring experiment of a film. It's an experiment that's either going to be pure genius or total crap. It's the line between Sin City and Howard the Duck (and you're free to determine which one of those is genius and which the crap). The fact that the Wachowski brothers haven't directed a movie without Keanu Reeves in over a decade means we should be excited for whatever they wanted to make this year, but our childhood obsession with Speed Racer doesn't hurt. With a great cast, a couple of visionary directors, and awesome source material, Speed Racer could be THE movie of the season. No matter how it turns out in the end, we can't wait.

3. Wall-E
"The last one we talked about was the story of a robot named Wall-E."
With Prince Caspian and this latest Pixar project, Disney could theoretically make roughly a billion dollars before the halfway point of the year, but we digress. We're HUGE Pixar fans and the pedigree behind Wall-E makes it one of our most anticipated flicks of the year. In fact, one of the previews lays it out for you. The same team that was finishing up work on Toy Story met about what they would do next and produced four ideas. The first three became A Bug's Life, Monsters Inc., and Finding Nemo. The fourth idea was Wall-E. That's all we need to know. Both previews only give us a glimpse of what Wall-E might actually be about (maybe Short Circuit II with shades of E.T.) but we don't really care. Pixar has built more than enough goodwill that we'd be there no matter what they produced this summer.

2. Hellboy II: The Golden Army
"Let this remind you why you once feared the dark."
The infamous 'summer of sequels' in 2007 taught Hollywood that it's not always quantity over quality. Most of the three-quels that season - Ocean's, Rush Hour, Shrek, Pirates - underperformed both critically and commercially. So why are the two best Summer 2008 previews sequels? Because Guillermo Del Toro and Christopher Nolan aren't your average sequel directors. After the success of Pan's Labyrinth, you'd think that Del Toro has now been given more creative control over Hellboy II. It sure looks like it in the preview, which has the signature marks of Guillermo all over it. If Pan's Labyrinth was a child's fable, The Golden Army could be that same child's journey through adolescence, when superheroes saved us from the things that go bump in the night. Del Toro has become more assured and accomplished with every picture, and while it might be hard for The Golden Army to top Pan's Labyrinth, we can't wait to see him try.

1. The Dark Knight
"Why so serious?"
Much of the "more creative control" argument for why we love The Golden Army preview applies to this one, too. It's one of the best previews we've seen in ages. Doesn't it feel like Nolan is firing on all cylinders here? It reminds us of how much more Raimi did with Spider-Man 2 than with the first film and, as much as we liked Batman Begins, we expect the analogy could hold with this sequel like it did with the webslinger - "The first one was good, but the second one was amazing." Nearly every shot of The Dark Knight could be a production still more interesting than most of what's in the theaters right now. From the first appearance of Heath Ledger's clearly-fascinating take on The Joker to him standing in a Chicago street, everything about The Dark Knight feels right. The preview for The Dark Knight stands above all others that you're likely to see this weekend at the theater. For this one, they could even charge admission.

[Editor's note: We did have M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening on our list, but since the trailer was recently removed from the web, our list wouldn't be the same without the visuals to back it up. Still, when you see it resurface, be sure to check it out.]