Trailer Alert: Brightburn (2019)

Maybe Lex Luthor was right… an upcoming movie from producer Peter Gunn is coming that asks what if “Superman” was monstrous.

True superhero horror is coming.  Not something like Hellboy, or Blade… but something where a superhero is the seed of destruction.  James Gunn, fresh of his dismissal from Disney is sticking with the superhero format, at least until he starts his work on Suicide Squad 2.  Remember, Gunn has a track record with horror, dating back to his directing days with the gross-out fest Slither. 

Gunn’s brothers Brian and Mark have written Brightburn, and the film is directed by David Yarovesky in his second feature film after Hive. This is a Sony production, and it will be curious to hear what Warner Brothers has to say about something that is so strikingly similar to the big blue boy scout. In DC Comics parlance, this would be an Elseworlds story.  A what-if counterfactual story, much like the famed graphic novel Red Son, which hypothesized, “What would have happened if Jor-El landed in the Ukraine instead of Kansas?”  That is an excellent book, by the way, if you are into comics.

The trailer opens very much like the Man of Steel trailer.  Flowing wheat.  An idyllic midwest farm, and a couple, Elizabeth Banks and David Denman who are desperately wanting a baby.  So queue up ma and pa Kent!  Brandon Breyer is told that he’s special, that yes, he’s different than the other kids in school, who see something odd about him. Little nods towards the Zach Snyder Man of Steel, like the hint of a cape showing this boy’s levitation or the swing in motion with a farmhouse in the background establish without a doubt what the source material here is.  A torch like destruction of a steel refrigerator door (Suggesting laser vision) and then you get the closing frame shocker.

Brightburn is scheduled for a Memorial Day release, and does not yet have a rating.