Amazon MGM Studios has released the trailer for Red Onehis Christmas-themed action comedy starring Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans. The new film, which hits theaters on November 15, is set to be the start of a brand new franchise that reinterprets and has fun with various holiday myths.
In the film, Johnson plays Callum Drift, the head of security at the North Pole. When Santa Claus – the red one from the title, played by JK Simmons – is kidnapped, Drift must team up with notorious bounty hunter Jack O’Malley (Evans) to rescue Santa and save Christmas. The trailer is entertaining, although the sight of several evil snowmen with ample rear ends might give you nightmares like in one of the best horror movies.
Red One: What we know so far
Amazon MGM Studios obviously has high hopes for Red One: Earlier this year, the company showed footage from the film at CinemaCon in Las Vegas and asked attendees not to give away the plot. But the film also had its pitfalls.
Red One was originally scheduled for a Christmas 2023 release. The delay was blamed on writers’ and actors’ strikes, but according to The Wrap, there’s a lot more to it than that. The Wrap cites “insiders” who claim that Johnson showed up to work eight hours late and behaved in various unsavory ways on set; that a “perfect storm of problems” drove up the budget; and that filming was plagued by problems stemming from the filmmakers’ inexperience. And according to entertainment journalist Jeff Sneider, the film didn’t come out last Christmas because it was “a big lump of coal… an absolute disaster,” with lead actors lacking any chemistry.
Amazon denies the allegations and also states: “Our tests were very convincing – the reactions from CinemaCon speak for themselves.”
There is certainly a lot going on in the trailer, which features Krampus, the Headless Horseman, and the aforementioned snow monsters. But visually, it looks a lot scarier than you would expect from the synopsis, and the mood here seems more like a Christmas horror movie – think Violent Night – because it’s a comedy.
Horror comedies are a difficult genre to pull off, especially when you want to create not only one of the best Christmas movies, but also what one of the trailer’s YouTube commenters aptly calls “the Christmas cinematic universe.” And with the release date still a long way off, it’ll probably be a while before we know whether The Rock has created a Christmas smash or a total flop.
