Listen, if the prospect of seeing Jason Statham do battle with a prehistoric super-shark doesn’t have you giddy with anticipation, then you just don’t know compelling cinema. Simple as that.
While it won’t be the talk of awards season next year, except maybe the Razzies, The Meg has mindless blockbuster written all over it, and we couldn’t be more excited to check the film out in a few months’ time. I mean, let’s face it, summer just isn’t the same without an excellent subaquatic fright flick, whether it be Steven Spielberg’s trendsetting 1975 release Jaws, Alexander Aja’s nauseatingly gory Piranha 3D, or Jaume Collet-Serra’s surprisingly sturdy The Shallows. For some reason, we love watching man-eating marine life do the deed, namely chomping on a chunk of human viscera, and in that regard, The Meg certainly looks like it’ll deliver the goods.
Proving that point even more today is a brand new international poster for the pic, which makes some fairly big waves as it teases the titular beast, who’s placed front and center, even if its body is mostly out of view.
Angled as a loose adaptation of Steve Alten’s Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror, this deep-sea thriller has all the makings of a true guilty pleasure – picture Dwayne Johnson’s Rampage, just with one giant, impossibly large shark instead of three mutated creatures. Though we imagine Jon Turteltaub’s pic lacks the necessary star power and budget to emulate the box office success of the aforementioned actioner ($398M), it’ll still 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), after all, and the bigwigs at Warner Bros. will no doubt have their fingers crossed in the hope that this larger-than-life thriller follows suit.
