Trailers of the week: Thunderbolts, Rumors, and Disclaimer

This week, I’ve been slowly catching up on Dark Matter; I’m about 20 hours into Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door on the Switch; and I’m still trying to work a trip to the movie theater into my schedule to see Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

I’m behind, in other words! And this week’s trailers shoveled so much more onto my need-to-watch pile, from the next Marvel MCU film, Thunderbolts, to the amusingly bizarre black comedy Rumours, to Disclaimer, Alfonso Cuarón’s new Apple TV Plus series. That’s to say nothing of all the game trailers from Sony’s State of Play event this week.

Check out some of my favorite trailers from this week below.

Marvel hasn’t said much about Thunderbolts, which sees David Harbour’s Red Guardian and his daughter, Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) in a new outing that concludes the MCU’s phase 5 in May next year.

Joining them are Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), and John Walker (Wyatt Russell), with Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) as their apparent ring leader. There’s also a mystery character named Bob (Lewis Pullman) who, as The Verge’s Charles Pulliam-Moore hinted earlier this week — and Polygon went at head-on — is probably Sentry, a Marvel version of Superm—er, a flying bulletproof guy with superhuman strength, speed, and agility.

I’m trying to think of the best thing to compare Rumours to. The big, sans-serif, drop-shadowed fonts scream 1970s-era exploitation films, as do its backlit fog and sometimes pinkish tint, which makes it look a bit like a well-aged film print.

The trailer has notes of Wes Anderson’s deliberate blocking and framing, mixed with the absurdism of Quentin Dupieux’s Rubber. There’s a gigantic brain? And some zombies. And leaders of the G7 nations, trapped in the woods with all of that. Whatever it is, Rumours, a black comedy from co-directors Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson looks like it’ll be a hoot when it hits theaters on October 18th.

Sinners sees one of director Ryan Coogler’s mainstay actors, Michael B. Jordan, playing 1930s twin brothers who go back to their hometown to start over, only to be confronted by some unknown horror. 

The name and trailer point to a religious theme. (“You keep dancing with the devil, one day he’s gonna follow you home.”) But shadowy figures outside a juke joint and a young boy walking into a church with fresh claw marks on his face hint at more. Maybe it’s a murderous cult, maybe the town is beset by actual demons. What’s really going on is a total mystery, and hopefully, it’ll stay that way until its March 7th theatrical release.

Disclaimer

Alfonso Cuarón’s new Apple TV series, Disclaimer, is a seven-part psychological thriller that starts streaming on October 11th. Cate Blanchett stars as a journalist named Catherine Ravenscroft, whose dark secrets are revealed in an anonymously written novel that is sent to her. 

The secrets are apparently bad enough to threaten her relationship with her husband, Robert (Sacha Baron Cohen), and her son, Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee). The series also stars Kevin Kline, Lesley Manville, Louis Partridge, Leila George, and Hoyeon, and it’s narrated by Indira Varma.