The world ends this summer - in your cinema

“Today, we are cancelling the apocalypse!” barks Idris Elba’s character in the trailer for Pacific Rim (out on August 8), the mammoth, $200 million sea-monsters-versus-giant-robots extravaganza being unveiled this summer by Warner Bros and Guillermo del Toro. There’s an awful lot of apocalypse to cancel, if you look at the other tentpole movies filling the schedules over the next few months. The Mayans said the world would end in December 2012, but must have neglected to sync their calendar with Hollywood’s all-important blockbuster playdates. Summer 2013 it is. Before that The Host (April 18), Stephenie Meyer’s love story about a future population overrun by aliens, deals with Earth, and Saoirse Ronan, as we no longer know them.

Andrew Niccol directs and hopes to get those Twilight fans’ hearts a-racing. The budget climbs with Oblivion (April 11), Joseph Kosinski’s follow-up to Tron: Legacy, which stars Tom Cruise as a soldier court-martialled on an alien planet. Details of the plot are closely guarded, but it looks like Cruise’s chance to regain some credibility after the wholly laughable Jack Reacher.

Into June, we have Will Smith — something of a veteran in this genre — schooling his son Jaden in the art of survival on our hostile, abandoned Third Rock from the Sun. That’s After Earth (June 6). After The Happening and The Last Airbender, M. Night Shyamalan may be a name to have cynical film buffs sniggering into their popcorn, but we’ll see.

Brad Pitt takes charge of the fightback in World War Z (June 20), based on a cult novel by Max Brooks subtitled “An Oral History of the Zombie War”. The long-delayed, Marc Forster-directed movie - subject to a reported seven weeks of reshoots — could yet surprise us, too, though few production reports are less confidence-boosting than “third act rewrites by Damon (Prometheus) Lindelof”. As far off as Elysium (no UAE release date), which is Neill Blomkamp’s first film since District 9, our world is still looking abject in 2159. The poor live on a depleted Earth, the wealthy on a man-made space station, and Matt Damon is fighting for equality. The thing that really piques excitement here is the involvement of Blade Runner’s set designer, Syd Mead.

There is even a pair of comedy apocalypses, whose titles are sure to seed confusion: This Is the End is a what-if American stoner farce with the world grinding to a halt, unsurprisingly, in James Franco’s flat. He’s playing himself, as are Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, Jay Baruchel, Danny McBride and Craig Robinson. It could be the last word in obnoxiousness, or strangely inspired: the trailer permits both interpretations.

Meanwhile, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are back in Edgar Wright’s The World’s End, about five friends whose attempt to top their legendary pub crawl turns into a ringside view of Judgment Day in some form or another (neither film currently has a UAE release date). Commercially speaking, it looks unlikely that any of these assorted doomsday epics will top Pacific Rim. It might sound like Battleship meets Transformers, but del Toro says he’s going out of his way to avoid the militaristic/Michael Bay aesthetic.

If humankind is allowed one last prayer, that might well be it. It wouldn’t be a Hollywood summer without a battle of the superheroes, too. Iron Man 3 (May 2) has some work to do — I know plenty of comic fans who hated the last one — but Marvel and Paramount are clearly hoping that last summer’s megahit The Avengers has managed to reboot audience affection for the franchise. Speaking of reboots, Man of Steel (June 13) is everyone’s dream for a world-conquering new Superman movie. Jersey-born leading man Henry Cavill at least got some training in Immortals, but the question is whether the geeks are ready to embrace Zack Synder’s direction again — his last film, Sucker Punch, was a critical and commercial wipeout.

From the ecstatic reaction to Man of Steel’s first teasers, it seems all might be forgiven. Meanwhile, Bryan Singer, whose surprisingly romantic Superman Returns (2006) didn’t wow the core audience, is turning to fairy-tale heroism for his own family-friendly seasonal romp Jack the Giant Slayer (March 14), occupying a sort of Clash of the Titans berth at the very start of silly season. Vehicles for Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson are like buses: you wait for one, and three come along. He’s being touted as “franchise Viagra” in G.I. Joe: Retaliation (March 28), which has a low bar to clear after the hideous first one. It’s he who gets the lion’s share of poster space: original hero Channing Tatum is rather barged to one side, and Bruce Willis looks to be turning up for an extended cameo.

There’s more Rock in the London-set Fast and Furious 6 (May 23), and in Pain & Gain (June 6), alongside Mark Wahlberg and Anthony Mackie, as a trio of fitness freaks who turn to armed robbery. By Michael Bay’s standards, the $23 million movie, a supposed passion project he’s been nurturing for years, practically qualifies as art-house.

Sequels come flying at us from May onwards with Star Trek: Into Darkness (May 16), reuniting all the 2009 hit’s Enterprise crew against Benedict Cumberbatch, whose mystery villain is currently not, repeat not, thought to be Khan. Swiftly stepping over The Hangover Part III (May 30), we have Pixar’s Monsters University (June 20), a belated prequel to Monsters Inc about Mike and Sully’s college years; Kick-Ass 2 (no release date); 300: Rise of an Empire (August 22) and The Wolverine (no release date), whose relationship to 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine, beyond the addition of a definite article, is not all that easily gleaned. The Lone Ranger (August 9) isn’t a sequel, though it does reunite director Gore Verbinski with his Pirates and Rango champ Johnny Depp, playing Tonto to Armie Hammer’s titular masked hero.

Disney will definitely be hoping for a Pirates-style, series licensing payday given the estimated $250 million budget. Remember Dante’s Peak versus Volcano in 1997, or Antz versus A Bug’s Life in ’99? This year’s curious doppelganger derby is between two rival March 21, with Gerard Butler taking bullets for Aaron Eckhart; the second is Roland Emmerich’s White House Down (June 27), with Channing Tatum defending Jamie Foxx. Prepare to have their virtues compared exhaustively, and all sorts of political readings dubiously superimposed. Should we ever tire of explosions, hardware, steroids and being beamed on to various planets, there’s always The Great Gatsby (May 17), Baz Lurhmann’s potential Cannes-opener and with any luck the party of the year, regardless of Leonardo DiCaprio’s questionable casting. If you’re already desperate for a foretaste of next year’s Oscar season, that’s roughly where it starts.