SUMMER MOVIE PREVIEW: Season’s offerings hold less junk and more substance

At this point in movie marketing history, they’ve almost conditioned the entire world to think that summer films should only be big escapist fantasies and loutish comedies. But like the sentient simians from the Planet of the Apes, some of us staged a rebellion last summer.

Well, to be clear, we stayed home in far greater numbers than the makers of “Independence Day: Resurgence,” “Jason Bourne,” “X-Men Apocalypse,” “Star Trek Beyond,” “Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising,” “Ghostbusters” and many other sequels/reboots expected.

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It seems that Hollywood, if only a little bit, got the message. The number of disappointing returns from supposedly sure-thing tentpole films between May and Labor Day 2016 might have influenced the slight but perceptible cutback in franchise product over the next four months.

Sure, there’ll be the usual superheroes and the newer women-who-kick-butt aplenty (“Wonder Woman” neatly bridges both genres). Aliens, pirates, mummies, minions, cars, cars that turn into space robots, Stephen King and, yes, those discoursing apes will all be returning by August.

But there’ll be fewer familiar characters and concepts this summer (Ninja Turtles begone!). And what we’ll be getting in their place looks like … Well, what is that? Not something I really recognize in the glare of the sun. Could it be movies about real stuff?

“I think it’s been made very clear that the audience wants new, original, diverse stories, and they’re responding to them when they get them,” notes Colin Trevorrow, who directed the highest-grossing summer fantasy hit of all time, 2015’s “Jurassic World,” but this year is releasing a character-based, could-happen-on-your-block family thriller, “The Book of Henry.”

“It’s a responsibility for all of us in this business to make sure that we don’t just continue to make new versions of the things we already love, but to create new things that we love,” Trevorrow continues. “You’re seeing it in the choices that studios are making, the kind of films that are being made and the films that people are choosing to go see.”

Warner Bros. sure hopes its choice to finance former Batfilm maven Christopher Nolan’s epic retelling of the World War II Dunkirk evacuation will be the choice of many viewers. And British PM Winston Churchill undergoes a dark knight of the soul, as one would, on the eve of D-Day in “Churchill.”

More recent conflicts get the treatment in the desert survival nail-biter “The Wall,” the Marine and her bomb-sniffing dog heart-tugger “Megan Leavey” and the Brad Pitt-starring satiric expose “War Machine.”

Dire history of another sort will be the subject of Kathryn Bigelow’s 1967 “Detroit” riot movie. Sex rather than race is the source of unrest in Sofia Coppola’s remake of the Clint Eastwood Civil War semi-classic “The Beguiled.”

More murderously romantic, 19th century shenanigans unfold in the British “My Cousin Rachel” and “Lady Macbeth.” Such matters go much further back, to the Middle Ages, in the “Decameron”-based, nuns-behaving-badly comedy “The Little Hours.”

Which doesn’t really remind us of last summer’s sleeper hit “Bad Moms.” But if Hollywood learned anything from its success, it was that borderline realistic laughfests about women partying too hearty need to be copied. So welcome this summer’s “Snatched,” “Rough Night” and “Girls Trip.”

Expect more serious, and probably funnier because of it, behavior from the young ladies of edgy indies “Patti Cake$,” “Ingrid Goes West” and “Landline.” Meanwhile, more mature studies of women cutting a little loose can be found in the Diane Lane vehicle “Paris Can Wait,” “The Lovers” with Debra Winger, the politically charged Salma Hayek show “Beatriz at Dinner” and the multigenerational trans dramedy called, appropriately enough, “3 Generations.”

Men of a certain age face post-midlife crises, too, when Bryan Cranston stars as “Wakefield,” Sam Elliott plays a fading movie cowboy in “The Hero,” and Tommy Lee Jones and Morgan Freeman make like resort community tough guys at “Villa Capri.”

But seriously – what can be taken moreso than artist biopics, especially if they’re of one so incendiary and tragic as rapper Tupac Shakur (“All Eyez on Me”)? The genre also comes in quirkily obscure – unless, of course, you’re from Canada, where everyone has apparently heard of folk artist Maud Lewis, profiled for the rest of us in “Maudie.”

And there are just some anticipated works of – dare we use this word during the sultry summer months? – cinema. See Kumail Nanjiani’s semi-autobiographical film festival sensation “The Big Sick,” “Hell or High Water” writer Taylor Sheridan’s self-directed, reservation-set murder mystery “Wind River” and – how eclectically odd is this? – two movies by cult fave filmmakers named after deep cut Paul Simon songs, Edgar Wright’s “Baby Driver” and Marc Webb’s “The Only Living Boy in New York.”

So there you have it. Enough real-world drama and humor that doesn’t insult your intelligence to make the summer movie season of 2017 feel like fall. Enjoy it, support it, indulge in it.

While it lasts. Though this will hopefully become a years-long trend, Disney did just announce that Trevorrow’s next movie, “Star Wars: Episode IX,” will open in May 2019.

Contact Bob Strauss at rstrauss@scng.com or @bscritic on Twitter.