CinemaCon: Description Of New R.I.P.D. And OBLIVION Footage

Even though production has just begun on Joseph Kosinski‘s Oblivion, Universal showed footage from the first few days of filming! In the brief snippets of footage we saw Tom Cruise commanding a ship, Morgan Freeman looking badass with a cool looking beard, and the beginnings of an action sequence. For those unfamiliar with the film, Cruise plays a veteran soldier who’s banished to the surface of a post-apocalyptic Earth, and tasked with repairing ships that hunt down the aliens who destroyed our planet. When a mysterious woman (Andrea Riseborough) crash-lands nearby, their encounter sets off an eye-opening chain of events. Again, since we only saw concept art and raw dailies, I won’t say more than it looked cool and it’s definitely on my radar.

Imagine if Jeff Bridges was playing a mix of The Dude from The Big Lebowski and Rooster Cogburn from True Grit. That’s what his character looked and sounded like in the brief bits of footage Universal premiered from director Robert Schwetnke‘s R.I.P.D., which also stars Ryan Reynolds. In the film, which hits theaters in June 2013, Reynolds plays a newly deceased cop who joins a group of undead officers in the “Rest In Peace Department”. Jeff Bridges stars as an R.I.P.D. veteran, and Kevin Bacon is onboard as the villain.

While production finished a few months ago, the effects-heavy film is still a long way away from completion, so Universal only had raw dailies and temporary VFX shots. What I took away from the presentation was the movie looked like it had a touch of Beetlejuice in it, which is a good thing. Again, it’s not fair to judge anything so far from being finished, but it looked cool and it definitely had a fun summer-movie vibe.