'Brightburn'Courtesy of Sony Pictures ©2018 CTMG, Inc. All rights reserved.
A hearty kudos to Marvel and Walt Disney, as their anticipated teaser for Avengers: Endgame snagged a record-breaking 289 million online views in the first 24 hours. That’s around 50 million more views than the first 24 hours for Avengers: Infinity War back in November of 2017. So even while Sony ended up delaying that first Spider-Man: Far from Home teaser until later this week, it was still, thanks to Avengers 4 and Captain Marvel, a fine week for superhero movie trailers.
I don’t know why Sony didn’t offer that Spidey teaser online following its debut at CXXP in Brazil yesterday afternoon, but I’d like to think it’s because they knew they didn’t need Peter Parker to win the hype wars. They had another ace up their sleeve, and in a week which offered the first trailer for Avengers: Endgame and the second look at Captain Marvel, it was Sony’s other skewed superhero flick that offered the most interesting trailer of the week.
I will admit, I didn’t know much about Brightburn until yesterday other than that it was an original horror flick produced by James Gunn. The marketing campaign was supposed to start last July at the SDCC, but Sony pulled back after Walt Disney unexpectedly dismissed Gunn from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 following the reemergence of some old off-color/offensive tweets. Since then, he’s hooked himself to directing DC Films’ Suicide Squad sequel, which makes Brightburn all the more ironic.
As you’ll notice when you watch the teaser, it’s essentially a very obvious homage to Warner Bros.’ still-glorious marketing campaign for Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel. It features similar font, music not unlike Hans Zimmer’s still-glorious Man of Steel theme, and a rich sense of small-town Americana before slowly revealing that this Superman origin story is going down a different path. It’s a bait-and-switch worthy of that first Red Eye teaser.
Penned by Brian Gunn and Mark Gunn and directed by David Yarovesky (The Hive), the movie isn’t just Gunn’s theoretical return to the kind of smaller-scale horror on which he made his name prior to Guardians of the Galaxy. Although it does share a leading lady (Elizabeth Banks) with Gunn’s Slither. It has such a simple and primal hook/high concept that I am aghast that I’ve never seen it explicitly tried before outside of a few indie comic books here and there. It’s essentially “What if Superboy or Smallville… but evil?”
It's such a killer concept, rooted in the idea that superheroes are essentially terrifying creatures with unthinkable power who just happen to be on our side. We'll see if this one will bother to interrogate the conventional superhero movie as a mix of white dude power fantasy and white dude martyr complex, but neither would be out of line from the man who directed Super. I don’t know how the film will play out, or specifically if it will build up its corker of a premise before essentially becoming a conventionally small-scale horror movie. But what we got yesterday looked incredibly promising and out-of-nowhere surprising.
In a week which saw big trailer launches for comparatively conventional superhero flicks, this comparatively unconventional riff on superhero mythology stood out. The only thing that could have made this trailer debut better was if it dropped in theaters unannounced. That’s what happened in April of 2015 when M. Night Shyamalan’s The Visit got a teaser before Unfriended and stole the thunder from the second The Force Awakens trailer and the first Batman v Superman teaser.
The trailers for Captain Marvel and Avengers: Endgame got the job done. But the first teaser for Brightburn, which turned out to be (as my wife put it) a “Bizarro Superman movie,” got the blood pumping. Brightburn will open next Memorial Day weekend alongside Walt Disney’s Aladdin and Fox’s Brad Pitt James Grey-directed sci-fi flick Ad Astra. We’ll find out in a five months whether the actual movie is anywhere near as cool as the idea. That goes double for M. Night Shyamalan’s Glass next month. Both films combine the two most popular sub-genres of the moment, the superhero movie and the high concept horror flick. But that’s for another day.
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