Blockbuster Trailers for 2018
Feb 8, 2018 • Mikhail Lecaros
Feb 8, 2018 • Mikhail Lecaros
Every year, the Super Bowl attracts the world’s largest television audience, as American football fans from around the world tune in to catch the action of Game Day. The televised event also tends to attract non-sports fans, as ad agencies go all out, debuting their flashiest, funniest, and quite often, most entertaining commercials during this time.
Beginning in 1996 with Independence Day’s brilliant first glimpse of an exploding White House, Hollywood studios began jumping on the bandwagon, crafting Super Bowl-specific trailers to promote their upcoming blockbusters.
Here are our favorites from this year’s Game Day:
Ok, this one is kind of a cheat, since the movie it’s “promoting” doesn’t really exist, but we’ll be damned if we didn’t wish it did! Featuring Danny McBride (This is the End, Tropic Thunder), Chris Hemsworth (Thor), Russel Crowe (Gladiator), Margot Robbie (Suicide Squad), and Hugh Jackman (Logan), this fake trailer turned out to be a hilarious tourism ad for Australia, and it just makes us want a fourth Crocodile Dundee movie starring this cast, ASAP!
Seemingly inspired by the disaster genre which producer Irwin Allen pioneered in the ‘70s and ‘80s (and bearing a resemblance to his Towering Inferno from 1974), Skyscraper is a starring vehicle for Dwayne Johnson, whose ability to make every movie better simply by being in it could be the deciding factor in making this flick a blockbuster.
Seeing as he’s already saved us from magical board games, earthquakes, and snake-inspired terrorist organizations, our money’s on The Rock winning the day.
Tom Cruise in a full sprint with his back unerringly straight? Check. Tom Cruise dangling precariously from a cable? Check. Tom Cruise careening through streets on a motorcycle? Check. Tom Cruise’s team framed for a crime they didn’t commit and being forced to save the world while clearing their names in a globetrotting adventure set to the latest remix of Lalo Schifrin’s immortal theme tune? Check, check, and check.
While it’s frankly remarkable that we’re anticipating a sixth film based on classic TV series Mission: Impossible, it’s downright incredible that, save for the second film, each one of these flicks has been pretty damn good, and well worth taking in on the big screen.
Hopefully, this will be worth the millions Warner Brothers allegedly spent to digitally paint out Henry Cavill’s mustache (which he was contractually obligated to retain), for the Justice League reshoots.
With Game of Thrones down to its last season, HBO is looking at Westworld to fill the void. Based on Michael Chricton’s 1973 film about a theme park whose robot attractions start killing the tourists, Westworld the series is a fascinating study in humanity and the nature of identity, served up with copious amounts of onscreen sex and violence. After the shocking revelations that ended the previous season, Season 2 promises to show multiple parks beyond the titular old American West-inspired one, and we can’t wait to see what comes next.
Speaking of theme parks gone awry…
As the third sequel to the movie that made the world fear velociraptors, 2015’s Jurassic World was far better than it had any right to be, reminding audiences just why they loved 1993’s Jurassic Park in the first place. Fallen Kingdom reunites Chris Pratt (Guardians of the Galaxy) and Bryce Dallas Howard (Black Mirror’s “Nosedive”) as they inexplicably return to Isla Nublar, which, following the events of the last film, has now been overrun over genetically resurrected dinosaurs. Also featured in the trailer is Jeff Goldblum’s cynical mathematician Ian Malcolm, who hasn’t been around since 1997’s The Lost World.
To be honest, they’ve always had us at “genetically resurrected dinosaurs”.
Renowned for his ability to keep a production’s details secret until actual release, J.J. Abrams (The Force Awakens) may have pulled off his greatest trick by unleashing a major Hollywood blockbuster on the general public via a Super Bowl trailer without so much as the courtesy of a “Coming Soon”.
Available to view soon as the game was over, the film in question is an actual, honest-to-God sequel to Cloverfield (itself released under a veil of secrecy after a months-long online campaign back in 2006) and 10 Cloverfield Lane (which nobody even knew was a sequel to Cloverfield until they were in the cinema).
Unlike something like Will Smith’s Bright, which had been announced months in advance as a Netflix Original to premiere online, this is a film that, at any other time, would have made its debut in a cinema. Regardless of The Cloverfield Paradox’s actual quality, this will go down in marketing history a stunt to remember.
With The Last Jedi just having completed its theatrical run, and with only three months to go before Solo’s release, a Super Bowl teaser was released to hype the arrival of a full trailer on the next day’s Good Morning America. At any rate, it’s certainly an intriguing trailer, giving us glimpses of a pristine Millennium Falcon, a case of seemingly perfect casting in young Lando’s being played by Childish Gambino himself, Donald Glover (Atlanta, Community), Woody Harrelson (The Hunger Games) in full mentor mode, and a familiar alien face in Chewbacca. Which leaves us with the title character, as played by Alden Ehrenreic who, to be honest, looks and sounds nothing like Harrison Ford in a movie ostensibly set a mere seven years before the character’s first appearance.
But hey, maybe he’ll win audiences over with his acting? At any rate, we only have three months to wait.
Conceived as the culmination to the current iteration of the Marvel Cinematic Universe that began in 2006’s Iron Man, Infinity War promises an unprecedented scale of superhero action as earth’s defenders band together to face a common threat. If you remember how thrilling it was to see six heroes come together in 2012’s Avengers, the filmmakers are looking to up the ante here, with a promised forty characters doing battle for the fate of the Earth.
The plot here centers around intergalactic warlord Thanos (James Brolin), and his quest to bring together six gems, the Infinity Stones, that will grant him unlimited power. It will take the combined efforts of the Avengers, SHIELD, and the Guardians of the Galaxy to face his threat, and defeat him once and for all.
Which one got you excited the most? Tell us below!
Mikhail Lecaros has been writing about movies and pop culture since 2012. Check out his movie podcast, Sub-Auters, and his all-out geekfest, Three Point Landing, on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Google Podcasts!
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