Idris Elba Stars In The Jaw-Dropping Trailer For Mad Max Director’s New Movie
This movie looks insane in all the right ways.
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Is George Miller the most versatile director on the planet? As the director of every single film in the Mad Max franchise, he’s basically the father of the post-apocalyptic action epic. And yet the same guy who gave us the Thunderdome brought us not only two movies about a talking pig, but two animated films — Happy Feet and Happy Feet Too — packed with singing, dancing penguins. Now he’s once again showing us his storytelling range with the upcoming fantasy romance epic Three Thousand Years of Longing starring Idris Elba as a wish-granting Djinn and Tilda Swinton as the scholar who unintentionally frees him. The film is seven years in the making, and MGM released the incredible trailer today.
The trailer opens with the solitary scholar Alithea (Swinton) who unwittingly buys the vessel acting as the Djinn’s (Elba) prison as a memento in Istanbul. Once he’s set free, the Djinn gives the traditional offer of three wishes while Alithea understandably seems cautious about the deal. As she accurately says at one point, “There is no story about wishing that is not a cautionary tale.” In a welcome change from most trailers, you can’t completely work out the story just from the preview, though it does seem like the Idris Elba character is the one more at risk here than Swinton’s. Regardless, with its incredible and vibrant visuals, it’s easy to imagine Three Thousand Years of Longing could have a similar impact on audiences as the recent Everything Everywhere All at Once. You can see for yourself in the trailer below.
The film is based on the 1994 short story “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye” by A.S. Byatt; originally published in The Paris Review and later reprinted in a short story collection bearing the same name as the story. It isn’t known yet how closely the Idris Elba/Tilda Swinton vehicle will follow the source material. We’ll know more the closer we get to Three Thousand Years of Longing‘s release date of August 31.
Strangely, Idris Elba actually has a movie coming out before Three Thousand Years of Longing yet we’ve heard precious little about it. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Baltasar Kormákur’s Beast hits theaters not quite two weeks before Three Thousand Years of Longing on August 19. Elba plays the father of two teen girls in South Africa being hunted by a “massive rogue lion.” However the promotion for the Universal thriller seems practically nonexistent.
Now that he’s done working with Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton on Three Thousand Years of Longing, fans will no doubt be anxious to hear about the progress George Miller has made on the Mad Max prequel film Furiosa. Tom Hardy’s premiere as the titular wasteland hero Mad Max: Fury Road was Miller’s most recent film before Three Thousand Years of Longing, and the director is set to return to the Mad Max franchise with Anya Taylor-Joy starring as a younger version of the character Charlize Theron originated in Fury Road. Taylor-Joy will be joined by Chris Hemsworth and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II. Sometime after that, we’ll finally see Hardy return to Mel Gibson’s old role for Mad Max: The Wasteland.
