The trailer has arrived for the James Gunn-produced horror movie BrightBurn. Gunn had originally intended to talk about the film at this year's San Diego Comic-Con, and even released a poster that left some wondering if the project is really a Bloodborne video game adaptation. However, his appearance was later cancelled after Disney fired him from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 in response to years-old offensive joke tweets being uncovered from his Twitter account, just a day earlier.
Turns out, BrightBurn is an original horror project in the vein of Gunn's scripts for The Belko Experiment and Slither (which he also directed), rather than a secret video game adaptation. The film itself was directed by David Yarovesky, who made his feature debut in 2015 with the sci-fi horror-thriller The Hive. He and Gunn have already worked together on multiple occasions, including the Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 "Inferno" music video. Yarovesky also played a "Goth Ravager" in the first Guardians of the Galaxy, and was a post-production consultant on The Belko Experiment.
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While Gunn's brother Brian and cousin Mark wrote the script for BrightBurn, it's based on an idea that Gunn helped to develop, and has simply described as being "personal, and different, and perfectly suited for our times [and], yes, terrifying". Thankfully, the trailer has now been released online and offers far more insight into the actual film. Check it out below, followed by the official synopsis.
What if a child from another world crash-landed on Earth, but instead of becoming a hero to mankind, he proved to be something far more sinister? With Brightburn, the visionary filmmaker of Guardians of the Galaxy and Slither presents a startling, subversive take on a radical new genre: superhero horror.
BrightBurn was originally scheduled to open in theaters on Friday, November 30, but Sony pushed it to May 24, 2019 after Gunn's Disney firing, and moved The Possession of Hannah Grace up to take its place. The horror film is now positioned to serve as counter-programming to Disney's live-action Aladdin remake and The Lost City of Z filmmaker James Gray's space adventure, Ad Astra. There's also an untitled Blumhouse movie set to release a week after BrightBurn, but the latter will mostly have the horror crowd to itself, when it premieres.
Judging by the trailer and synopsis, BrightBurn is essentially a horror movie reimagining of the Superman mythology. The trailer alone is full of shots that are clearly trying to emulate the iconography of the Superman movie franchise and its vision of small-town America (Man of Steel, in particular), but with a horror-thriller twist. This also explains why Gunn originally planned to reveal the film's trailer at SDCC, in order to appeal to the superhero-loving crowd directly. It'll certainly be interesting to see how they and everyone else respond to the idea of a "Superman horror film" when BrightBurn arrives next year.
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Source: Sony Pictures