Movies
‘Rampage’ Poster Aligns George With Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson
The newest tag-team champions of the world… George and The Rock!
The newest Rampage poster sides Dwayne Johnson with his enormous BFF, George (played by Jason Liles), who must align to stop a mutated lizard and wolf from destroying the city. While the art uses the tagline, “Big meets bigger,” it actually dwarfs George and makes him look much smaller than expected. Also, much like all the trailers, the layering looks off and Johnson in no way looks like he’s part of the same environment in the background. Eesh.
The Brad Peyton-directed film will now be released on April 13, up one week from its previous April 20 date. This provides a two-week buffer between it and Infinity War.
In the film, “Primatologist Davis Okoye (Johnson), a man who keeps people at a distance, shares an unshakable bond with George, the extraordinarily intelligent, silverback gorilla who has been in his care since birth. But a rogue genetic experiment gone awry transforms this gentle ape into a raging monster. To make matters worse, it’s soon discovered there are other similarly altered alpha predators. As these newly created monsters tear across North America, destroying everything in their path, Okoye teams with a discredited genetic engineer to secure an antidote, fighting his way through an ever-changing battlefield, not only to halt a global catastrophe but to save the fearsome creature that was once his friend.”
Rampage also stars Oscar nominee Naomie Harris (Moonlight), Malin Akerman (TV’s Billions), Jake Lacy (TV’s Girls), Joe Manganiello (TV’s True Blood) and Jeffrey Dean Morgan (TV’s The Walking Dead); as well as P.J. Byrne (Final Destination 5, The Wolf of Wall Street), Marley Shelton (Solace), Breanne Hill (San Andreas), Jack Quaid (The Hunger Games: Catching Fire), and Matt Gerald (TV’s Daredevil).
The trailer for Ti West’s upcoming adaptation of A Christmas Carol raised a lot of eyebrows when it dropped earlier this week. While plenty of folks initially dismissed Ebenezer as a derivative project meant to cash in on the recent wave of unnecessary prequels that expand the backstory of beloved characters (such as 2023’s Wonka), Charles Dickens’ original novel already made a point of exploring Ebenezer Scrooge’s origins in detail – meaning that this new film is likely just a particularly faithful adaptation of the source material under a different name.
Couple that with the fact that the movie is being helmed by a genuine horror auteur and I think it’s safe to say that the latest iteration of the first modern ghost story is in good hands.
That being said, one detail that immediately jumped out at me during the brief teaser (other than a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod to Johnny Depp’s iconic bedroom death scene from the original A Nightmare on Elm Street) is the fact that many of Ebenezer’s ghosts appear to have been directly lifted from the iconic John Leech illustrations that accompanied the first edition of Dickens’ novel.
Here are a couple of stills from the trailer compared to the original artwork:
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
The Phantoms in ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Ebenezer’
Marley’s Ghost in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
Mainly working with old-school wood and steel engravings that would later be transferred to print, Leech was instrumental in crafting the iconic look of history’s most influential phantoms – especially since Dickens is said to have been deeply involved with the creation of these so-called “comic illustrations.”
And since the novel is commonly said to have popularized spiritualism in Victorian England, much of the ghostly iconography that we still see in genre media to this very day (including some of Ti West’s previous films) can be traced back to the author’s partnership with Leech.
Ebenezer won’t be the first A Christmas Carol adaptation to borrow heavily from these designs, but I can appreciate how Ti West is incorporating an important part of horror history into his latest film.
Ebenezer will be available in theaters starting November 13.
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