Amazon MGM Studios has released the trailer for Red, a holiday-themed action comedy starring Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans. The new film, which will hit theaters on November 15, is expected to be the start of a brand new franchise that reimagines and pokes fun at various holiday-related mythologies.
The film stars Johnson as Callum Drift, head of security at the North Pole. When Santa Claus – the title’s Red One, played by JK Simmons – is kidnapped, Drift must team up with infamous bounty hunter Jack O’Malley (Evans) to rescue Santa and save Christmas. The trailer is nice, although the image of several evil snowmen with generous buttocks may give you nightmares as one of the best horror films.
Rode: what we know so far
Amazon MGM Studios clearly has high hopes for it Red: it showed footage of the film at CinemaCon in Las Vegas earlier this year, urging attendees not to reveal the plot. But the film did not go off without problems.
Red was originally scheduled for a Christmas release in 2023. The delay was attributed to the writers’ and actors’ strikes, but according to The cover there’s a lot more to it than that. The Wrap quotes “insiders” who claim that Johnson would show up to work eight hours late and behave in various unsavory ways on set; that a “perfect storm of trouble” sent the budget into orbit; and that the shoot was plagued by problems arising from the filmmakers’ inexperience. And according to entertainment journalist Jeff Sneiderthe film was not released last Christmas because it was “a big lump of coal… an absolute disaster” with lead actors with no chemistry whatsoever.
Amazon has denied the allegations, also saying that “our testing has been very strong – CinemaCon’s response speaks for itself.”
There’s certainly a lot going on in the trailer, with Krampus, the Headless Horseman, and the aforementioned snow monsters. But visually it looks a lot scarier than you’d expect based on the synopsis, and the atmosphere here is more like a Christmas horror movie – think Violent night – because it’s a comedy.
Horror comedy is a difficult genre to pull off, especially when you’re trying to create not only one of the best Christmas movies, but also what one of the trailer’s YouTube commenters brilliantly calls “the Christmas movie universe.” And with the release date still a ways away, it looks like it’ll be a while before we know whether The Rock cooked a Christmas cracker or a total turkey.