18 Crucial Questions For 2016's Most Anticipated Movies

By Jack Pooley /

8. Will The Ring & Amityville Reboots Succeed?

The Question: The Ring franchise gets a quasi-reboot with the upcoming Rings (the last movie, The Ring Two, came out in 2005), while Amityville: The Awakening is the fourteenth movie in the franchise and the first to get a theatrical release since the Ryan Reynolds-starring remake, which was also released in 2005. Will these attempts to resuscitate two flagging franchise succeed, or are they destined for the straight-to-VOD dungeon? The Likely Answer: With less than three months to go until Rings releases, we still don't have a trailer, which is a pretty terrible sign, and combined with the no-star cast (aside from The Big Bang Theory's Johnny Galecki), might make the $33 million 3D film a tough sell. That said, if the trailers play-up the series' iconic imagery, it could easily succeed if only because there's a whole new generation of kids who have never heard of Samara. We'll go with it being a minor hit. As for Amityville, it's not a very good sign that the film's trailer first hit in August 2014, and the movie was then pulled from release before finally getting a new release date eight months later. It's got a great cast (including Jennifer Jason Leigh, Kurtwood Smith and Thomas Mann), but is much, much more likely to bomb than Rings.