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[Editor's note: Your devoted Flavorwire team is taking Memorial Day off, but we've left you with some of our favorite summer-related features that you may have missed the first time around. This post originally ran April 20, 2012. Enjoy!]

Y’know, there was once a time when the phrase “summer movies” was confined to describing movies that came out in, I dunno, the summer. But over the past few years, as studios have continued to make the pursuit of tentpole blockbusters their primary financial goal, the season’s starting pistol keeps going off earlier and earlier, and with the Entertainment Weekly summer movie preview showing up last week (yep, pre-Tax Day), alongside the impending release of The Avengers next Friday, we can either shake our calendar-clenching fists at these upstart kids, or just go along with it and present our summer movie preview now. Thus, after the jump, we present the ten big summer movies we’re most looking forward to, in order of release; agree, disagree, or add your own in the comments.

The Avengers

RELEASE DATE: May 4
DIRECTOR: Joss Whedon
CAST: Robert Downey Jr., Samuel L. Jackson, Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Chris Hemsworth

We’re figuring you might’ve heard a thing or two about this one, seeing’s how it’s been teased in every Marvel movie of the past four years, and its ad materials have been, to say the least, ubiquitous. But early clips have proven exciting, early reviews are ecstatic, and the full-throttle fun of The Cabin in the Woods has got us all in a tizzy about seeing more big-screen Whedon. Only one question: what the hell will they do for a credit cookie? How about a nice, quiet scene of Agent Coulson and Nick Fury taking a trip to Bed, Bath, & Beyond?