If Jaws is often cited as the first true summer blockbuster, then director Jon Turteltaub is about to take the idea of giant shark thriller and dial things up to 11.
We are, of course, referring to The Meg, Turteltaub’s zany summer flick aiming to become your next guilty pleasure. It has all the main ingredients, too: a gruff Jason Statham, tongue-in-cheek humor, and a prehistoric shark that hails from the Early Miocene era.
But there is one particularly stubborn beast that has somehow – almost inexplicably – defied extinction. And that’s where The Meg begins. It’s been set for a mid-August release by the Powers That Be, and in order to ensure excitement is at a fever-pitch, a new international promo has surfaced today, and it arguably presents our best look yet at 2018’s most bizarre movie. And in the year of Avengers: Infinity War, Ready Player One and Hereditary, that’s not a phrase to be taken lightly.
Flanked by a Chinese oceanographer (Winston Chao) and his daughter Suyin (Li Bingbing), Jason Statham’s deep sea diver, Jonas Taylor, soon becomes swept up in a mission to stop the unstoppable, which seems to involve trapping the super-sized shark in some form of harness as depicted above.
Whether that suicide mission yields any tangible results is another question entirely, but with talk that The Meg could spawn a potential franchise, we wouldn’t be all that surprised to see Jon Turteltaub’s thriller leave things on a cliffhanger.
The Meg swims into select theaters on August 10th, and you’ll never look at deep water the same way again…