A Week In Movies: Cruise's Oblivion & Butler's Olympus Have Their Worldwide Release & The Lone Ranger, The Hunger Games & Man Of Steel Launch New Trailers

Cinemas are now fully in the grip of blockbuster season, with Tom Cruise's Oblivion and Gerard Butler's Olympus Has Fallen expanding their reach into new countries this week. 

And next week sees Iron Man 3 begin its global assault. Stars Robert Downey Jr, Rebecca Hall, Ben Kingsley and Don Cheadle were in London this week for the film's premiere. Director Shane Black even took time out to do a stand-up routine with cowriter Drew Pearce to introduce the first UK press screening.

Meanwhile in the South of France, the Cannes Film Festival just announced its line-up, with world premieres of new films with Leonardo DiCaprio (Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby), Emma Watson (Sofia Coppola's The Bling Ring), Ryan Gosling (Nicolas Winding Refn's Only God Forgives), Justin Timberlake (the Coen brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis) and Michael Douglas (Steven Soderbergh's Behind the Candelabra).

The week's biggest movie event was CinemaCon in Las Vegas, where the next big blockbusters were previewed to an ecstatic audience. The cast of Star Trek: Into The Darkness made an appearance for a special screening and Brad Pitt even turned up to present some advance footage of his upcoming zombie blockbuster World War Z, commenting that he made the movie because he wanted something his boys could watch before they turned 18.

At last Sunday night's raucous Mtv Movie Awards, we got our first real look at The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, with a full-length trailer that conveys the film's even darker tone. The entire cast is back from the first episode, plus an especially sinister Philip Seymour Hoffman. It opens in November.

We also got our first real trailer for this summer's new Lone Ranger movie, starring Armie Hammer as the anonymous law enforcer with Johnny Depp as his Native American sidekick Tonto. The trailer is packed with action and comedy, which shouldn't be surprising since the film was directed by Gore Verbinski (Pirates of the Caribbean).

A much more serious take on action heroics can be seen in the new Man of Steel trailer, which further emphasises the film's link to The Dark Knight and producer Christopher Nolan. Starring a bulked-up Henry Cavill as Superman, the film takes a much more introspective, grounded approach. It also looks properly epic, with meaty roles for Russell Crowe, Amy Adams, Kevin Costner and Michael Shannon. The film opens in June.

And finally, there's a new trailer for the latest movie version of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, starring Hailee Steinfeld and Douglas Booth, along with Damien Lewis, Ed Westwick and Paul Giamatti. The film looks lavish and intense, filmed in the actual Italian cities where the original play was set.

Rich Cline