When faced with the question, “How can a production company/studio be Cannon Films but perpetually good and profitable,” A24 typically answers “merch.” But even limited-edition collabs, action figures, or flashily-covered hardbound copies of their scripts can’t make that Beau is Afraid number go from red to black on the balance sheet. Hence, Alex Garland’s Civil War, a big-budget glimpse inside the nightmares of your average MSNBC or Fox News staffer — and the wet dreams of their bosses — that’s taking over IMAX screens just in time for Easter dinner.
It’s a wee bit late for Garland’s trend-hopping — seriously, the tide of books and movies and TV shows hit its high water mark well before the 2018 midterms — but you just know that people will get mad about this, and the hope is that they’ll get mad enough to pay for an opening weekend hate-watch. Or to see their darkest fantasies play out on the big screen. You never know!
Anyhow, A24 dropped another short trailer for the film earlier on Tuesday, and you, too, can now imagine a short trailer in which those who hold your preferred ideology become the cleansing revolutionary vanguard toppling statues and shit. Or you could just think about the Roman Empire some more.
Peep it:
Here’s the best the marketing department could come up with for this one, given that they’re probably operating under a combination of filmmaker and studio dictate not to reveal too much and a sense of “Protect Ya Neck,” given how awful culture can be when dropping marketing materials for something like this (the YouTube comments, normally an A24 circlejerk, are decidedly more mixed as of this writing):
“An adrenaline-fueled thrill ride through a near-future fractured America balanced on the razor’s edge.”
Cool, we guess.
Anyway, the first shots fired in Civil War will ring out in a theater near you on April 12. If you need us, we’ll be in our bunker, riding out the dropped hot takes from blast to shockwave to fallout to nerd-culling winter. And no, you won’t want to join us — all we’ve got is tinned beans, and given that we’re critics, we’re actually inoculated to the smell of our farts, which are poisonous to others.