Fox offers a look at X-Men, dragons, apes and more

Thanks to the studio previews at CinemaCon, the box-office prospects for 2014 are looking rosier than they did a few days ago. Every major studio has several surefire blockbusters in the pipeline, and one of the most promising lineups was revealed by Jim Gianopulos, CEO and chairman at 20th Century Fox.

The studio added some extra showmanship to its preview event, bringing to the Caesars Palace stage an array of bikinied and feather-adorned samba dancers who gyrated while Ester Dean and rapper B.o.B. performed a song from the upcoming Rio 2.

Fox is in the lucky position of having three well-established tentpoles returning this summer. X-Men: Days of Future Past, with original director Bryan Singer back at the helm, unites the new and older casts of the X-Men franchise in an apocalyptic time-travel thriller. A sequence screened in Las Vegas showed young mutants squaring off against giant lethal metallic creatures and jumping through holes in the space-time continuum, and judging by the trailer which followed, that's just one set-piece among many.

Footage from How to Train Your Dragon 2 and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes promise a repeat of the pleasures and thrills of the original box-office hits. And for summer counterprogramming, Fox has The Fault in Our Stars, based on a successful young-adult novel and starring Hollywood's latest It Girl, Divergent lead Shailene Woodley as a teenage cancer patient who falls in love. Woodley was on hand to introduce some clips, and said she's such a fan of the property she would have worked as a production assistant if it turned out she wasn't right for the role. This poignant romance should be catnip for teen girls and will likely be Woodley's second box-office hit of the year.

The event included an intriguing preview of the bestselling mystery Gone Girl, starring Ben Affleck as a man under suspicion for the murder of his wife. But most intruguing of all was the first peek at Secret Service, Matthew Vaughn's action tale of a clandestine operation that bypassses the bureaucracy of stodgy institutions like the CIA. Fox screened an instant-classic scene in which deceptively prim and proper Colin Firth takes on a gang of young British hooligans in a pub with startling efficiency. (It's kind of a companion piece to a similar scene shown from Denzel Washington's Sony vigilante film, The Equalizer.) Secret Service wasn't on anyone's radar, but it sure is now after the rousing reception at CinemaCon.

And, oh yes, Fox has more tentpoles in the pipeline: Night at the Museum 3, Taken 3, The Penguins of Madagascar, Kung Fu Panda 3. The titles zipped by at the end of the program, almost as if Fox wanted to save some juice for CinemaCon 2015.

—Kevin Lally