Trailer Park: Not the Comic-Con Edition
There were plenty of big new trailers debuted during Comic-Con, which perhaps overshadowed the fact that there were lots of OTHER trailers debuting for movies that were perhaps… less anticipated? But as we learned this summer when X-Men: First Class turned out to be better than either Thor or Green Lantern, the anticipated movies aren’t always the best. So here are some other upcoming flicks that might turn out to be one of your favorites… or not.
Battleship
It was kind of surreal seeing this trailer come up before Cowboys & Aliens. It was like, “This movie exists. This movie is real.” So, rumor has it semi-acclaimed director Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights, Hancock) pitched a story about aliens attacking a naval vessel to the studio. Apparently the studio’s response was that they would only make the movie if they could name it after an already existing property, and thus we now have a movie theoretically based on the board game Battleship. Who knows, maybe this will be the next Transformers. Taylor Kitsch, Liam Neeson, Brooklyn Decker, Rihanna, and Alexander Skarsgard headline the weird mix of a cast, and the film will be released May 18, 2012.
Dream House
I am not one of those people who usually thinks trailers are way too spoilery. It drives me nuts when people say “trailers these days give away the whole movie.” Watch trailers from the old days, and trust me, they give away way more of the movie than modern trailers do. But unless I’ve completely misunderstood what Dream House is about, they give away some pretty key plot twists right in this trailer. That said, it looks like a cool horror movie and has a good cast. Daniel Craig moves his family into a house where some murders happened. But maybe he’s crazy! Rachel Weisz, Craig’s new fiancee, co-stars along with Naomi Watts. All in all this looks creeptastic.
John Carter
The trailer for Disney’s adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom books caused a minor stir among film blogs when it was released a few weeks ago, mostly because they couldn’t decide if it was the worst trailer of the year or the best. It is certainly an unconventional ad for a Burroughs swashbuckler. In any case, Taylor Kitsch (yup, again) stars as the civil war soldier John Carter, who suddenly wakes up on Barsoom (what the locals call Mars), romances a princess, and makes friends with a four-armed sword-wielding green dude voiced by Willem Dafoe. One reason this movie may throw people? It’s based (apparently rather closely) on a book about Mars written decades before we actually knew anything about Mars. Another? Disney’s bizarre decision to drop the descriptive portion of the original title, John Carter of Mars.
Tucker and Dale vs. Evil
The pitch for this movie claims that it does for that old horror staple, backwoods hillbillies, what Shaun of the Dead did for zombies. The trailer makes it look like a one joke movie, but, well, it is a pretty good joke. Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine star as two country guys who get mistaken for crazy serial killers by a bunch of good-looking teenagers… who then start accidentally dying all over the place. And so a bizarre red-band trailer is born. Enjoy… it is very gory:
In Time
This is a movie that actually did give us an extended Comic-Con trailer, but somehow failed to make any kind of impression. Why? Well, look at it. It has a pretty good cast, a semi-intriguing sci-fi premise, but somehow it just feels like something’s missing. In the future, everyone stops aging at 26 (thus giving the film an excuse to cast lots of young, pretty people) but at that point you have to keep earning time or you die. Bits of your life are like currency in this scenario. When Justin Timberlake wakes up to find himself in possession of a century, a thriller ensues. Cillian Murphy, Amanda Seyfried, and Vincent Kartheiser also star.
We’ll see you all next time in the Trailer Park.
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