Unbreakable Honest Trailer: Shyamalan Presents Man of Feels

M. Night Shyamalan's comic book-inspired thriller Unbreakable has gotten an Honest Trailer, ahead of its sequel Glass hitting theaters. Unbreakable opened in late 2000 and was the first movie Shyamalan directed following his Oscar-nominated breakout hit The Sixth Sense. While the film did well commercially ($248 million at the worldwide box office on a $75 million budget), it grossed far less than Shyamalan's ghost drama and got more of a lukewarm reception by comparison. However, in the years that followed, Unbreakable came to be regarded by many as Shyamalan's best film ever and fans held out hope that a sequel might yet come to pass.

Shyamalan eventually went on to make Split: a 2017 thriller about Kevin (James McAvoy), a man with dissociative identity disorder who kidnaps three young women to help him unleash a powerful new personality known as "The Beast". However, in the film's twist ending, it was revealed that Split had taken place in the Unbreakable universe and quietly set the stage for a sequel that brings the characters from Unbreakable and Split together. The film was quick to get a green-light thanks to Split's critical and commercial success, and has since been dubbed Glass, after Unbreakable's Mr. Glass (Samuel L. Jackson), aka. Elijah Price.

Now, with Glass set to hit theaters in just over a week, Screen Junkies has given Unbreakable the Honest Trailer treatment. As you can see below, the trailer starts out by referencing Split and all the people who were confused by its ending, having not seen Unbreakable beforehand. The video goes on to poke fun at Shyamalan's more infamous storytelling techniques (characters delivering dialogue slowly and with frequent pauses, for example), as well as his run of critically-derided movies (which began in the mid-2000s and didn't really end until 2015's horror-comedy The Visit hit theaters).

Interestingly, as the Honest Trailer points out, Shyamalan originally expressed his desire to make an Unbreakable trilogy at the time of the film's release, but it took longer than expected for his plans to come together. That might've been for the best, though; as the video notes, the filmmaker went through a real rough patch in the 2000s/early '10s and even tried his hand at a pair of widely-dismissed big budget movies (The Last Airbender and After Earth) before he returned to making atmospheric character-driven fare like Unbreakable again. This not only allowed Shyamalan more room to mature as a storyteller before he went back to the Unbreakable universe, but also led to a new generation of film buffs discovering the original movie in that time.

More than that, Glass is arriving at a time where its deconstructionist approach to the comic book superhero genre is not only fresher, but more relevant than ever. In the almost-two decades since Unbreakable was made, the superhero genre has undergone a major renaissance and is all the more lucrative (and respected) now for it. Glass will be the first in a wave of superhero films hitting theaters in 2019 and may get things going on a strong note, based on its box office opening projections and - fingers crossed - expected positive reception. Indeed, here's hoping "Man of Feels 2" proves worthy of the twenty-ish years it took to become a reality.