"The odds of being swallowed alive by a whale are not zero."
This trailer left a big impression on attendees when it debuted during CinemaCon earlier this year, and Disney/20th Century Studios has now released the first official teaser and poster for director Brian Duffield's "animal attack" thriller, Whalefall.
The movie is based on the 2023 novel of the same name by Daniel Kraus, and follows a teenage scuba diver (Austin Abrams) who is inadvertently swallowed by a Sperm Whale while searching for his father's (Josh Brolin) remains.
The intense trailer spotlights a lot of footage from this sequence, and concludes with the diver being swallowed whole by the gigantic mammal as it's attempting to catch its lunch.
“Disney felt it’s such a crazy scene, and it happens so early in the movie, that they felt a little bullish on, ‘Yeah, let’s show them how our movie kicks off and let them wonder where we could go from there,'” Duffield tells Variety. “Even though we are going to be a very claustrophobic movie, we’re pretty big too! We have a lot of spectacle, sometimes in surprising ways, and it just felt like we’ve never seen a movie that is set in a place where most of this movie is set.”
Duffield goes on to explain that he wasn't interested in making a "monster movie."
“The whale is not a bad guy. The whale doesn’t understand that it’s swallowed Austin. It’s trying to swallow its lunch, and Austin is just a byproduct of that,” says the filmmaker. “We wanted it to not feel like a monster movie, but to feel like Austin’s inside of a living animal. There’s something horrifying about that, but also something beautiful, too.”
Check out the trailer and poster below, and let us know what you think in the comments.
"Following the death of his father (Josh Brolin), Jay Gardiner (Austin Abrams) goes diving off the central Coast of California in search of his remains, but is swallowed by a massive sperm whale. While trapped inside its belly with only one hour of oxygen left, Jay comes to realize that the hard-earned lessons his father imparted may be the key to his escape."
Elisabeth Shue, John Ortiz, Jane Levy, and Emily Rudd also star. The producers are Brian Grazer, Brian Duffield, Jeb Brody, Allan Mandelbaum, with Doug Merrifield, Richard Abate, Will Rowbotham serving as executive producers.
Whalefall arrives in theaters on October 16.