We’ve got one more sleep before we get to watch Idris Elba punch a lion, with Beast set to come roaring into theaters tomorrow. Hoping to capture a similar man-versus-beast ethos like Jaws did many a decade ago, the film seems to be doing a respectable job with it, currently sitting on an admirable but still volatile 85 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
The film follows Idris Elba as the recently widowed Nate, a wildlife biologist who takes his two daughters on a trip to South Africa, hoping to heal from the death of his spouse. During a family excursion to a game reserve, things turn perilous when a lion, deeming all humans as monsters after surviving a poaching attack, goes on the hunt for them, forcing Nate to put his best foot forward in a high-octane fight for survival.
It looks to be one of the most exciting matchups all summer, to say nothing of what parallels may be drawn between the ferocious cat and determined family-man, and Elba, in an interview with USA Today, credited Leonardo DiCaprio‘s work on The Revenant as inspiration for the battle-heavy sequences with the lion.
“The actual fighting of the lion was really difficult. There were no lions used in the making of this film. The bear sequence that Leonardo does is really realistic and is sort of a benchmark in terms of what we wanted to achieve for the audience. Because everyone who watched that was horrified.”
Beast releases to theaters on August 19.