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SUMMER MOVIES Summer Movies Big-screen releases offer an escape from real-world troubles BY MARC LOFTUS A udiences have a lot to choose from this summer, be it jungle adventure, superhe- ro action, musical documentary, or high- speed thriller. Jungle Cruise, Black Widow and F9 are all drawing audiences to theaters, showing that people have been craving the big- screen experience after a long year of shutdowns due to COVID. As we do every summer, Post looks at many of this season's big-screen releases (a number of which are simultaneously streaming). Read on to hear about the post production process for the aforementioned films, as well as Escape Room: Tournament of Champions, The Sparks Brothers, In the Heights and Spirit Untamed. And be sure to check out our coverage of The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard, Luca and Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway elsewhere in this issue. J U N G L E C R U I S E In Disney's Jungle Cruise, botanist Dr. Lily Houghton (Emily Blunt) is on a quest to find a leg- endary tree, whose petals are said to have healing powers that can change the world of medicine. She enlists wisecracking skipper Frank Wolff (Dwayne Johnson) to take her and her brother, MacGregor (Jack Whitehall), deep into the Amazon, where they will follow a course from an antique map and an arrowhead artifact that is believed to provide clues as to the tree's location. But Frank is a bit of a scammer and misrep- resents his services, showing up with a ram-shack- led boat, called La Quila, and his own interest in making the discovery. The lush, green rainforest is deceptively beautiful, but extremely dangerous, and the explorers find themselves attacked by natives, nearly shipwrecked from the rapids, and pursued by villains and supernatural forces on their journey. Jaume Collet-Serra directed the film, and it was his past work with editor Joel Negron that led to them working together once more. Negron has a history of working on large, VFX-heavy films. He was an assistant editor on Armageddon and an additional editor on Pearl Harbor. He also worked on Sleepy Hollow and Mars Attacks with director Tim Burton, as well as two Transformer movies. More recently, he cut the Marvel block- buster Thor: Ragnarok. "I met Jaume when he was directing House of Wax…and kept my relationship with him," Negron explains. "We got back together when he did The Shallows, which was another big visual effects movie with a digital shark." Jungle Cruise would have its share of visual ef- fects, coming from contributors that include Weta Digital, ILM, Yannix, Rodeo FX, Rising Sun Pictures and UPP. For Negron, putting the film together, with so many visual effects still in development, was something he is often faced with. "What we normally do with (visual effects) scenes — and there was a lot of them with Jungle Cruise — is we start out with either a previs sequence or storyboard sequence, so you have that as a template," he explains. "And as you get the dailies, you start inserting the dailies that are non visual effects, that are minimal visual effects, and either intercut that with previs from The Third Floor or storyboards. If things are adjusted while they are shooting, you go back to the previs company and they adjust the pieces that fit in. You keep building upon that sequence as you get more footage, more previs, early visual effects shots…You just keep building on top of it until you've got the entire sequence." For the 'rapids' scene, in which the explorers take a shorter but much more dangerous route, Negron cut in a clip from the 1951 movie The African Queen to serve as a place holder. Jungle Cruise was shot partially in Hawaii. The film was edited in an Avid at DNx115 resolution.