The movies are back, baby! Case in point, Universal Pictures has released a new trailer for Beast, which stars Idris Elba (The Suicide Squad, The Dark Tower) as a man who must contend with a gigantic killer Lion in the wilds of Africa, amongst other things. It looks like the studio has committed to making what is ostensibly a creature feature (using a real-life animal). This late-summer event film is being given a wide, exclusive theatrical release. What more could a genre lover ask for? Let’s take a peek at what the studio has cooked up for us.
This looks like a nice throwback to the kinds of movies studios just don’t make all that often anymore. At the very least, we don’t see them in theaters as often as we used to. Call it “Anaconda with a lion”, but whatever we have going on here, it looks to be violent, tense, and above all else, like a good time. The last thing to hit theaters with similar vibes in the creature feature subgenre may have been Alexandre Aja’s Crawl in 2019, which focused on alligators. It should be noted that the movie comes with a pretty fun tagline that boasts, “Sometimes the rustle in the bushes actually is a monster.” So, what exactly is the movie about? Here is the official synopsis:
“Elba plays Dr. Nate Daniels, a recently widowed husband who returns to South Africa, where he first met his wife, on a long-planned trip with their daughters to a game reserve managed by Martin Battles (Sharlto Copley), an old family friend and wildlife biologist. But what begins as a journey of healing jolts into a fearsome fight for survival when a lion, a survivor of blood-thirsty poachers who now sees all humans as the enemy, begins stalking them.”
The cast also includes Iyana Halley (The Hate U Give) and Leah Sava Jeffries (Empire), not to mention Sharlto Copley, of District 9 fame. Baltasar Kormรกkur (Everest, 2 Guns) is in the director’s chair for this one, working from a screenplay by Ryan Engle (Rampage, Non-Stop). Jaime Primak Sullivan cooked up the original story. Sullivan and Bernard Bellew are on board as executive producers, with Will Packer, James Lopez and Kormakur producing.
It figures to be a big summer for genre fans at the movies, with a wide array of releases hitting theaters between now and September. Aside from the recently released Firestarter, we’ve also got Jurassic World Dominion, The Black Phone, Nope and Bodies Bodies Bodies on the way, amongst others.
Beast is set to hit theaters on August 19.
