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With the Winter Holiday Season coming up, a variety of new and exciting movies are being released all throughout December. This season is the best time of the year to enjoy the movies with friends and family. Here are just a few movies that will be released within the next few weeks. 

Cats is a new movie that will be released on December 20th. It is a British-American fantasy film that is based on the original Cats musical, written by T.S. Eliot and composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber. It is about a tribe of cats, called the Jellicles, who come together at the Annual Jellicle Ball. Here, they make the Jellicle Choice, where they decide which of them will go to the Heaviside Layer to be born into a new life. It takes place over one night, and each cat presents his or her case as to why they should be chosen to be reincarnated. 

This movie will feature many celebrities including Taylor Swift and James Cordon; it will also introduce Francesca Hayward. Hayward is currently the principal dancer in the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden, in London. This will be her first feature-length film role. 

Tom Hooper, director of Les Misérables and The King’s Speech, and Andy Blankenbuehler, choreographer of Hamilton, will also be helping in the production of this movie. Lloyd Webber and Taylor Swift also revealed that they have collaborated on “Beautiful Ghosts”, a song that will be included as part of this new movie.

“I really had an amazing time with ‘Cats’. I think I loved the weirdness of it. I loved how I never felt I’d get another opportunity to be like this in my entire life,” said Taylor Swift.

In order to create the illusion of the cat’s perspective, oversized furniture and props are used. Instead of having the actors dress up in cat costumes, “digital fur technology” is used. CGI, computer generated imagery, puts human faces onto digital bodies. This technique makes the characters look somewhat like cats, but also resemble people. In a behind-the-scenes video that was released, actors are shown with VFX dots on their faces and motion capture suits. VFX, visual effects, are used for facial motion capture. In this case, they add fur to the actor’s faces. Motion capture is also used to transfer the actor’s movements into digital characters. Certain features or position markers are tracked in 3D, and data is collected to resemble the actor’s motions. 

Jumanji: The Next Level is another movie, jam-packed with action, adventure, comedy, and fantasy. This will be the third movie to return after Jumanji and Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. It will be released on December 13th, with Nick Jonas, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, Ser’Darius Blain, Alex Wolff, Rhys Darby, Madison Iseman, and Morgan Turner playing key roles.

It is a sequel to Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, directed by Jake Kasadan and Joe Johnston. One of the characters, Spencer, ends up back in the game. His friends go back in to rescue him, and end up going on an adventurous and dangerous journey together. 

This movie is based off a book, by Chris Van Allsburg, who wrote the original story of Jumaji. An American illustrator and writer, he is also famous for other books like The Polar Express and The Z was Zapped. 

In the original movie, Judy and Peter find a magical board game called Jumanji. They get stuck inside the game, and meet Allan, who has been trapped in the game for 26 years. Judy, and Peter try to outwit the game’s forces, and free Allan for good. . The second movie was created in 2017, based off the original storyline, with a few new elements and changes to the movie. 

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, directed by J.J. Abrams, is another movie that everyone is eagerly waiting for. It will be released in theaters on December 20th, and will have its world premiere in Los Angeles on December 16th. This will be the ninth Star Wars movie to be released, and will most likely be the final film in Disney’s Sequel Trilogy. 

The Star Wars series is a mix of science fiction and fantasy. The surviving Resistance, a secretive and private military force, will face the First Order. The First Order is a military dictatorship rump state that was first introduced in the 2015 movie, Star Wars: The Force Awakens.This iconic series originally started in 1977, with the Star Wars original trilogy. Today, it has grown to become one of the most popular and well-known movies around the world. 

Little Women is based on the classic novel originally written in 1868, by Louisa May Alcott. It will be released on December 25. Many award winning actors such as Emma Watson, Saoirse Ronan, Meryl Streep, and Timotheé Chalamet will be starring in this film. It will be the eighth adaption of the original story, along with seven other musicals and theatre adaptations. 

The book was originally a coming of age story about four sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, who live together. The four girls face hardships of poverty and social expectation, especially because their father is away fighting. They strive to be free in the world and find their own happiness, even though they live in a society where women were so dependent on the men in their lives. This book is now one of the most popular books in the history of American literature and is recognized as one of the best children’s stories. It has never gone out of print, and many people claim that it will continue to be a popular novel, regardless of the era or time period. A freshman from the Academy for Medical Science Technology (AMST) said, “I think it’ll be really interesting to see how the director chooses to recreate many of the scenes from the book and how the actors will react as their assigned characters. I hope to see some of my favorite actors!” 

Rather than telling the story in the way the book has it, this movie will switch up the order of events. Gerwig decided to mix around the order of the different scenes and will show the movie in an almost entirely different sequence than what the original book has. Another special aspect of this film is the comedy that is emphasized throughout the different scenes.