Deep sea rescue diver Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham) sees all of his worst nightmares manifest before his very eyes in this new action shot from The Meg.
Coming to us by way of Empire (h/t Bloody Disgusting), this striking and deeply unsettling photo places Taylor directly in front of a 75-foot Megalodon shark, which hasn’t roamed the Earth in almost 2.6 million years. But for Jon Turteltaub’s The Meg, itself a loose adaptation of the eponymous horror-thriller novel from Steve Alten, one particularly aggressive Megalodon somehow managed to escape the jaws of extinction, leaving the door open for a larger-than-life summer movie that’s so big, it makes Jaws seem like small fry by comparison.
As for Jason Statham’s character, he’s a seasoned diver whose previous experience with the prehistoric beast proves indispensable, as it makes him one of the few people on Earth capable of stopping the underwater titan. And, well, let’s just say he’s up against it…
Flanked by a Chinese oceanographer (Winston Chao) and his daughter Suyin (Li Bingbing), 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 – just before it’s able to chomp on Statham’s character like a lone, vulnerable shrimp. Rather him than us!
It’s been described as the guiltiest of guilty pleasures and perhaps the ultimate popcorn movie, so it’ll be interesting to see how The Meg fares once it darts into theaters this August. That late-summer corridor is typically fertile ground for Hollywood sleeper hits (see: Don’t Breathe, Annabelle Creation, The Other Guys), and the bigwigs at Warner Bros. will no doubt have their fingers crossed in the hope that Jon Turteltaub’s larger-than-life thriller follows suit.