You Pick 'Em: Predict the Five Biggest Summer Box Office Hits

Iron Man 3 (opened May 3)

The latest installment of the Iron Man franchise pits billionaire playboy Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) against a terrorist mastermind who calls himself the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley). Though the Mandarin in the original Iron Man comics wielded 10 rings endowed with alien superpowers, director Shane Black was intent on making his movie villain more grounded. ''This guy doesn't fly, he's not from space, and his rings aren't magic. The idea I kept in mind was Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now,'' says Black. ''I could have done space aliens, but I didn't particularly want to — and to Marvel's credit, they didn't say, 'The Avengers made a boatload of money — let's just revive that template.' They said, 'Let's do something different.''' —Josh Rottenberg

The Great Gatsby (May 10)

Moulin Rouge! helmer Baz Luhrmann adapts Gatsby into a visually sumptuous big-screen drama. Leonardo DiCaprio plays the enigmatic Jay Gatsby, a self-made millionaire who throws lavish parties at his Long Island estate while keeping his humble origins shrouded in mystery; Carey Mulligan costars as the shallow, emotionally fragile Daisy Buchanan, with whom Gatsby has a doomed affair. Luhrmann blows the cobwebs off the literary classic by bringing all of his famed visual flair — and a reported budget north of $120 million — to Fitzgerald's slim but thematically rich novel. In a post-Great Recession world, he says, the book's indictment of the empty pursuit of wealth and status is as relevant as it was in the Roaring '20s. ''You can see the bond scam in it, you can see the subprime scam,'' he says. ''We're not putting that on top of it — it's there.'' —Josh Rottenberg

Star Trek Into Darkness (May 17)

As the title suggests, Star Trek Into Darkness brings the crew of the USS Enterprise into some grim space. ''They are tested, and the tests are cruel ones,'' says Chris Pine, who returns as James T. Kirk, the newly minted captain of the Enterprise. A mysterious foe (Sherlock's Benedict Cumberbatch) is the one challenging Kirk with acts of mass terrorism. Zachary Quinto, who reprises his role as the frosty, logical Mr. Spock, says Kirk and Spock ''grow closer as things get worse.'' —Geoff Boucher

The Hangover Part III (May 24)

The third Hangover breaks from the waking-up-from-a-blackout-night formula that some found redundant in the second installment. ''Part of us was like, 'F--- everyone — we have to do it again,''' director Todd Phillips says. ''But we had this other story in mind that ties everything together.'' That story finds Zach Galifianakis' man-child, Alan, going off the rails following the death of his father, while he and his fellow Wolfpack-ers get mixed up with Ken Jeong's gangster, Mr. Chow, and a new villain played by John Goodman. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. For instance, the film's trailer shows a giraffe meeting a grisly fate due to a freeway overpass. States star Ed Helms, ''I'll go on record as saying that decapitating giraffes is reprehensible — but pretending to decapitate a computer-generated giraffe in the right context is totally hilarious.'' —Josh Rottenberg

Fast & Furious 6 (May 24)

After directing four Fast & Furious movies, Justin Lin has become the premier car-chase filmmaker of his generation. Building on the franchise-best gross of 2011's Fast Five, the new film takes the series even further from its street-racing roots, as Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) leads his crew into vehicular battle with ex-special-ops rogue Owen Shaw (The Hobbit's Luke Evans). Paul Walker, Dwayne Johnson, and the rest of the expanding ensemble are all back, as is Michelle Rodriguez, whose Letty supposedly died two movies ago. She mysteriously returns — and she's working for Shaw. For Diesel, the Letty-Dom relationship gives this film an added emotional hook. ''You're able to watch them reconnect and fall in love again,'' he says. ''The stakes are different. It's not just about beating up the biggest guy.'' —Darren Franich

Now You See Me (May 31)

Jesse Eisenberg, Isla Fisher, Woody Harrelson, and Dave Franco play a group of magicians who pull off elaborate Robin Hood-esque bank heists while being chased by an FBI agent (Mark Ruffalo). The thriller (from Clash of the Titans director Louis Leterrier) marked a chance for Eisenberg to work with real-life illusionists like the ones he grew up with in suburban New Jersey. ''My mother was a birthday-party clown when I was younger,'' says the actor, ''and for my birthdays she bartered with the local birthday-party magician so that he would do my birthdays and she would do his kids'.'' —Samantha Highfill

The Internship (June 7)

The Internship, starring Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson (who haven't shared the screen since their smash 2005 comedy Wedding Crashers), explores the workplace challenges facing both the fortysomething protagonists and the millennials who dominate the tech giant's intern pool. ''I wanted there to be something aspirational at the intersection of those two generations, both of whom feel slightly disenfranchised,'' says director Shawn Levy (Night at the Museum). The film's biggest casting coup: persuading Google to come on board. ''From the beginning, I said, 'If we don't get Google and suddenly we're talking about a fictionalized tech company, I'm probably not going to want to direct this movie,''' says Levy. ''Going into the belly of the beast was one of the cool aspects of the project — and that would have been compromised by going to something like 'Shmoogle.''' —Josh Rottenberg

After Earth (June 7)

In their first onscreen team-up since 2006's The Pursuit of Happyness, Will and Jaden Smith star in a sci-fi epic about an interplanetary ranger (Smith the elder) who has to rely on his ranger-in-training son (Smith the younger) when their vessel crashes on a savage, inhospitable planet...called Earth. After coming up with the original idea for the movie, Will Smith hired Gary Whitta (The Book of Eli) to pen a script, and comics gurus Peter David, Michael Jan Friedman, and Robert Greenberger to write a 350-page ''history'' chronicling what might happen if our planet became a human-free wildland full of fearsome animals. (Smith hopes to develop After Earth into a cross-platform brand with a TV show and books.)

Finding a director, though, required a stroke of luck. ''I was calling [M. Night Shyamalan] to wish him a happy birthday, and he said, 'Man, I don't want your birthday wishes — I want to make a movie with you,''' says Smith. ''I sent him the screenplay, and he sent back ideas that were absolutely genius.'' But a signature Shyamalan surprise ending wasn't one of them. ''There's a dramatic center to this movie that doesn't rely on gimmicks,'' says Smith. ''It relies on the power of the love between a father and son.'' Of course, a Shyamalan movie without a twist could be the biggest twist of all. —Adam Markovitz

This Is the End (June 12)

This is the End is not 2013's first apocalypse comedy, but this tale of a disastrous event, whose exact nature we won't spoil, has a unique selling point. Nearly all the main actors in the star-studded cast — including James Franco, Craig Robinson, codirector Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, Danny McBride, Jay Baruchel, Emma Watson, Michael Cera, Jason Segel, and Rihanna — play versions of themselves attending a party at Franco's L.A. home. Much of the film's fun derives from the jokes made at the expense of the actors' professional and private lives. Many of the stars have known one another for years — Rogen, Franco, and Segel all starred on Judd Apatow's now-14-year-old NBC show Freaks and Geeks — which helped lend both bite and a sense of authenticity to the lampooning. ''You have to be friends with people to make those jokes,'' says Rogen. ''There's a lot of real s--- in the movie.'' One aspect of the film that doesn't jibe with reality? Cera's portrayal of ''Michael Cera'' as a sexually degenerate cokehead. ''When people are playing themselves, they either play into the idea you have of them or they really play against the idea you have of them,'' says Rogen. ''Michael Cera is just literally nothing like that character.'' —Clark Collis

Man of Steel (June 14)

In the past few years, Warner Bros. was faced with a string of Marvel hits (Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, and The Avengers) and began to feel the pressure to rejuvenate its DC brands. Seeing Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy revive Batman, they enlisted the auteur and his Gotham team — screenwriter David S. Goyer and producer Charles Roven among them — to resurrect Superman as a grittier, more damaged hero. Goyer and Nolan devised a hunted, fearful Superman — one who didn't even identify himself with that grandiose moniker but just wanted to blend in on his new home planet. Introspection, loneliness, and doubt are risky ingredients for an action-packed summer tentpole, but as the project came together, Warner Bros. executives knew they had to make the franchise ''feel fresh and different,'' says Jeff Robinov, president of Warner Bros. Pictures Group (which, like Entertainment Weekly, is a division of Time Warner).

Enter Henry Cavill, the 29-year-old dark-haired, blue-eyed Brit selected to don the red cape this time. In this iteration, Clark Kent's heroic tendencies would rise to the surface only when the threat was great enough. It would have to be a global menace — one that might also trigger an internal conflict about whether he belongs on Earth even as he yearns to be among his own kind. That's what pits him against General Zod (Boardwalk Empire's Michael Shannon), a Kryptonian tyrant who wants Clark to join him back on Krypton, which would mean abandoning his post as defender of the weaklings of Earth.

One such weakling: Lois Lane (Amy Adams), who is as much a threat as a love interest in Man of Steel. The intrepid Daily Planet journalist — her boss, Perry White, is played by Laurence Fishburne — is chasing down reports of a wandering stranger who is capable of superhuman feats of strength. ''She's very transient. She's ready to pick up and go at a moment's notice,'' Adams says, noting that the trait is shared by Lois and Clark. It's not much of a spoiler to say that gradually Lois starts to see something more in him than a good front-page story. ''She ends up rescuing him, I always say,'' Deborah Snyder says.

And Man of Steel may end up rescuing the DC movie universe. With a revamped Superman, Warner Bros. hopes to lay the groundwork for a planned Justice League film that would team up many DC characters and possibly launch several new franchises. ''It's setting the tone for what the movies are going to be like going forward. In that, Man of Steel is definitely a first step,'' says Robinov. —Anthony Breznican

World War Z (June 21)

A six-year odyssey, Brad Pitt's $170 million World War Z runs in a different direction from AMC's The Walking Dead. It's closer to Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later in its viral rhythms, and even dovetails with Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. The movie follows Pitt's character, a former U.N. ''hot zone'' specialist, as he circles the globe looking for the origins of a virus that kills its victims and then reanimates their cadavers as rasping vessels of infection. Instead of lurching, these zombies move with savage predatory crispness and eerie unison; they pile atop one another like ants in a tower. ''We looked to nature,'' director Marc Forster says, ''to find something new, something we haven't seen in a zombie movie.'' The result: a more lively undead. —Geoff Boucher

Monsters University (June 21)

When it comes to animated high jinks in college, you usually think of keg stands and panty raids. With the prequel Monsters University, though, Pixar is matriculating two of its most beloved creations. Blue fur ball Sulley (voiced by John Goodman) and walking martini olive Mike (Billy Crystal) weren't always the best of buddies, especially when they were first learning how to frighten youngsters. ''Mike goes about scaring from an academic standpoint,'' says Goodman, ''and Sulley's more of a natural.''

Goodman was glad to return to the recording booth with Crystal. ''I just try to hang on and follow Billy. It usually winds up with me trying to hold in my laughter,'' he says. And just because they're off camera doesn't mean things don't get physical. ''I put my whole body into it. There's a lot of what I call 'grunt work,' which is literally grunting and falling down.'' The story — which features familiar college tropes like fraternity pranks and a hard-nosed dean (Helen Mirren) — draws on numerous cinematic college romps, including one that Goodman starred in nearly 30 years ago. ''I'd say it's more Revenge of the Nerds than anything,'' he says. —Keith Staskiewicz

The Heat (June 28)

The Heat initially appealed to everyone involved — a.k.a. stars Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy, director Paul Feig, and writer Katie Dippold (Parks and Recreation) — because it turns a traditional genre on its head. Dippold was initially inspired by the buddy-cop comedy Running Scared, which includes a montage of hot babes riding on the back of Billy Crystal's and Gregory Hines' scooters. ''[Dippold said to me,] 'Why can't the women be in the front?''' says Feig. ''I just like the idea of the problems of two professional women who love their careers,'' he adds, ''and aren't looking for a man or looking to be married or looking to be saved.'' Says Bullock, ''At the end of the day, we made what I feel is the greatest love story I've ever done. We've either sacrificed any credibility we've built up and are never going to work again or we're going to be doing a bunch of sequels. Either way, we're willing to lose the rest of our careers for this.'' —Karen Valby

White House Down (June 28)

When America's first home is attacked by mercenaries, a wannabe Secret Service agent (Channing Tatum) becomes an ad hoc bodyguard for the president (Jamie Foxx) while trying to keep his own daughter (Joey King) out of harm's way. The premise sounds as over-the-top as past Roland Emmerich disaster blockbusters, such as Independence Day and 2012 — and that's just how Tatum likes it. ''People can scoff at it and say Roland only makes big popcorn movies,'' says Tatum, who did many of his own action-hero stunts for the film, including falling nine feet onto a glass roof. ''But I think the world is begging for stuff like this. I want to eat popcorn on the Fourth of July.'' —Adam Markovitz

The Lone Ranger (July 3)

For Gore Verbinski's Disney reboot of The Lone Ranger, star Johnny Depp wanted to ''set the record straight'' about his edgy, buff, bird-hat-wearing Native American character from the '50s TV series. ''Tonto is nobody's sidekick. Tonto is a proud warrior.'' Armie Hammer (Mirror Mirror) costars as the titular masked vigilante in what he describes as ''a big-ass comedy-Western rock opera.'' Sans musical numbers, obviously. Hammer's Ranger is John Reid, a country-born, city-educated lawyer who arrives in a small town in 1869 Texas hoping to civilize it with his highfalutin ideals. An ambush by the villainous Cavendish gang changes everything: John's ranger brother (James Badge Dale) is killed, while John is rescued by Tonto, who becomes his partner in seeking revenge. And unlike previous Ranger iterations, the whole tale is told from the perspective of Tonto — a character as idiosyncratic as any on Depp's résumé — who may not be the most reliable narrator. ''Tonto is something of a lost soul. Ostracized from his tribe, most likely by his own design, out of guilt,'' Depp explains. ''But yeah, he's damaged. He's just looking to get back on track. His own particular brand of eccentricity stems from all that. He's searching for a resolution, in his own, warrior way.'' —Adam Markovitz

Despicable Me 2 (July 3)

What's a professional supervillain to do after stealing the moon? Settle down and raise three adopted daughters, of course. When we catch up with Gru (voiced by Steve Carell), he's facing the perils of fatherhood. But then he's tapped by an ultrasecret agency called the Anti-Villain League to track down an even more dastardly foe. Carell's own parenting experience (he has two kids with wife Nancy Walls) helped inform the way he voiced Gru. ''He had some specific input about the evolution of his character toward the girls [in the film],'' says Pierre Coffin, who's directing with Chris Renaud. ''He was much sweeter, actually, and less harsh towards them.'' What a softy. —Grady Smith

Pacific Rim (July 12)

Pacific Rim is about big things: big robots, big monsters, big earthshaking battles. So it seems fitting that the film — the first major summer tentpole from fanboy favorite Guillermo del Toro (Hellboy, Pan's Labyrinth) — comes out of the ruins of his biggest disappointment. Del Toro initially planned only to co-write and produce this sci-fi adventure about humankind's last stand against rampaging alien creatures because he'd be directing his dream project, an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's novella At the Mountains of Madness. But Universal pulled the plug on that film, and only days later del Toro took the helm of Pacific Rim. ''I jokingly say that I was a widower on Saturday and on Monday I was cruising the Pacific Coast Highway with a blonde in my convertible,'' he says.

Pacific Rim features epic clashes between enormous, human-piloted robots called Jaegers and massive creatures called kaiju (Japanese for ''giant monsters''), but don't be fooled by the Transformers-meets-Godzilla trappings. At its heart, del Toro insists, the film has all the quirks and eccentricities his fans would want: ''We do crazy s--- nobody has ever done.... I always feared that with big budgets came big constraints, and this has been the opposite. I've kind of been ruined for life.'' In a good way, we trust. —Josh Rottenberg

Grown Ups 2 (July 12)

Three years after Grown Ups, Adam Sandler is back as the eternally adolescent Lenny, who's moved with his family from the big city to his childhood hometown. Set on a single summer day, the sequel — Sandler's first ever — once again follows the escapades of Lenny and his band of arrested-development pals (played by Chris Rock, Kevin James, and David Spade). One such adventure involves returning to a quarry the guys frequented as kids, where they run into a frat boy played by...Twilight's Taylor Lautner. ''As adults they go back there, but these frat guys have taken over,'' says director Dennis Dugan. ''There's a big confrontation.'' And a big, nude leap off a cliff. —Lindsey Bahr

Turbo (July 17)

Ryan Reynolds voices a snail named Turbo, who, after a freak accident gives him superspeed, tries to fulfill his dream of entering the Indianapolis 500. So how exactly do you get the famously chiseled Reynolds to play one of the animal kingdom's squirmier critters? ''I pitched him the idea just after he became PEOPLE's sexiest man of the year,'' says director and co-writer David Soren. ''I was very nervous, but the very first thing out of his mouth was 'I can't wait to be a snail!'''

Other actors keen to get their shell on include Maya Rudolph, Snoop Lion, and Samuel L. Jackson, who play a group of gung ho racing snails. The film also features human characters like racing champ Guy Gagné (Bill Hader) and a Turbo-assisting taco salesman voiced by Michael Pe¨a. Soren's original pitch for the movie? ''The Fast and the Furious with snails.'' —Clark Collis

RED 2 (July 19)

In this sequel to 2010's action-comedy, former black-ops agent Frank Moses (Bruce Willis) reassembles his team of gun-toting retirees to hunt for a weapon of mass destruction. The search leads them to an imprisoned physicist played by series newcomer Anthony Hopkins. ''When they find him in the asylum, they think he's a strange man, but harmless,'' Hopkins teases about his character. ''Underneath all that is a different personality. I don't want to elaborate on that, because it's a bit of a surprise.'' However, the actor notes that RED 2 features a pairing guaranteed to delight movie buffs: ''I have a scene with Brian Cox, who's the other Hannibal Lecter!'' —Darren Franich

The Wolverine (July 26)

The Wolverine finds the clawed X-Man battling ninjas and the yakuza in Japan. After Darren Aronofsky dropped out, James Mangold (3:10 to Yuma) came on board to refine the script — and perfect the film's aesthetic. ''I wanted more night scenes, more rain scenes. I wanted everyone a little sweatier, the air a little heavier, the light a little darker,'' says the director, who drew inspiration from classic Japanese cinema and even Clint Eastwood's The Outlaw Josey Wales. ''I wanted it to be very visceral, physical.'' As such, Hugh Jackman's two-a-day workouts came into play. ''One of the looks we wanted was this sense of what Hugh's trainer calls 'vein-iture,' like feeling his veins bulging,'' Mangold says. ''There's a kind of rawness and almost animalistic quality to his physicality, and he worked very hard to make that happen. It's not Photoshopped.'' —Tim Stack

The Smurfs 2 (July 31)

When the evil Gargamel (Hank Azaria) captures Smurfette (voiced by Katy Perry) in the sequel to the 2011 film, it's up to the little blue guys and their human friends Patrick and Grace Winslow (Neil Patrick Harris and Jayma Mays) to travel to Paris to save her. But first, Smurfette has to figure out whether she actually might enjoy being part of Gargamel's clan. ''The Smurfs 2 has an overall message about families not necessarily being the one you were created by, but the one you were raised by,'' says Harris. ''It's kind of adult, but it's still a very Smurfy movie.'' After all, Patrick's stepfather (Brendan Gleeson) does turn into a duck. —Lindsey Bahr

300: Rise Of An Empire (Aug. 2)

Digital animation, ripped abs, ultraviolence: The original 300 was a game-changing megahit in 2007, with a $450 million global gross that practically invented the idea of the March blockbuster. A sequel was inevitable. Just one problem: Most of the characters didn't make it out alive. So Rise of an Empire tells a parallel story focused on the naval battles between the Persians and the Athenians. 300 director Zack Snyder co-wrote the screenplay (which is based on Xerxes, Frank Miller's as-yet-unreleased graphic novel) and tapped Noam Murro (Smart People) to direct.

Meanwhile, Rodrigo Santoro and Lena Headey reprise their roles as Persian God-King Xerxes and Spartan Queen Gorgo. But it's Eva Green as Artemisia, the only female commander in Xerxes' navy, who takes center stage this time. ''She's kind of a Lady Macbeth/Cleopatra character,'' says Green. ''She's obsessed by vengeance and wants to go to war with the Greeks.'' Midbattle, she meets Athenian general Themistokles (Strike Back star Sullivan Stapleton). ''He's my archenemy, but there's a very strong attraction,'' says Green. ''If they'd been in another kind of situation, it might have been a romantic story.'' Alas, they'll have to settle for passionate combat. —Darren Franich

Elysium (Aug. 9)

Matt Damon's socially conscious sci-fi action yarn takes place in 2159, when the world has been divided into two classes: The rich elite live aboard the titular high-tech orbital space station, and everyone else suffers down below on a withering Earth. To depict our planet's unpromising future, writer-director Neill Blomkamp (District 9) took a trip to the outskirts of Mexico City to film at one of the world's largest garbage dumps. ''The first day we drove in there, the smell came into the car and I was questioning if this was even possible,'' says Blomkamp. ''I was like, 'What have I done?''' Add Damon, ''From a hygienic standpoint, it was a DEFCON 1 couple of weeks.'' —Keith Staskiewicz

Planes (Aug. 9)

Disney says its new animated adventure comes ''from above the world of Cars.'' The windshields have eyes and the vehicles talk, but this time the focus is on Dusty Crophopper (voiced by Dane Cook), a small-town flyer who competes against sleeker jets in an air race around the world. The project was originally developed as a direct-to-video release, but the studio deemed it flightworthy enough to soar into theaters. How did first-time feature director Klay Hall feel about the upgrade? ''You mean after I woke up off the floor and the blood rushed back into my head?'' he asks. Sounds like he was up in the clouds. —Grady Smith