If you’re at all like us, you’ve been wondering exactly what the hell happened to director Steve McQueen ever since he won the Best Director Oscar for 12 Years a Slave back in 2014. McQueen wasn’t known for working at a furious pace — he typically released films at least two years apart — but this five-year hiatus seemed unprecedented.
Well, now we know exactly what he was up to this whole time: Watching Michael Mann movies and the 1983 ITV series Widows (about a group of widows who attempt to finish the heist that their dead husbands were trying to pull off) so that he and screenwriter Gillian Flynn (also the creator of a 2013 piece of pop-consciousness gold in Gone Girl) could adapt that series into a big-budget film with the kind of cast you can only dream about.
We’re not even kidding when we say that this Widows is more star-studded than the Vanity Fair Oscar party, and we’ll just list some of the cast here for you: Viola Davis, Cynthia Erivo, Daniel Kaluuya, Michelle Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki, Liam Neeson, Carrie Coon, Colin Farrell, Garret Dillahunt, Robert Duvall, Andre Holland, Lukas Haas, Atlanta‘s Brian Tyree Henry, and Jon fuckin’ Bernthal.
Jesus Christ, it’s like a Roland Emmerich-directed disaster movie, but it might actually win an Oscar! Enough talk, just take a look at the trailer:
Between this and the Suspiria remake, it’s been a pretty damn great day for movie trailers that line up perfectly with our interests. McQueen is an appointment-viewing filmmaker, and each of his prior films are utterly masterful exercises in style and tone and substance. We’re only slightly nervous that he seems to be without his good luck charm, Michael Fassbender, but that’s only because we’re resistant to change and this new and confusing world confuses us.
Here’s a synopsis:
“From Academy Award-winning director Steve McQueen (“12 Years a Slave”) and co-writer and bestselling author Gillian Flynn (“Gone Girl”) comes a blistering, modern-day thriller set against the backdrop of crime, passion and corruption. “Widows” is the story of four women with nothing in common except a debt left behind by their dead husbands’ criminal activities. Set in contemporary Chicago, amid a time of turmoil, tensions build when Veronica (Oscar winner Viola Davis), Alice (Elizabeth Debicki), Linda (Michelle Rodriguez) and Belle (Cynthia Erivo) take their fate into their own hands and conspire to forge a future on their own terms.”
Widows hits theaters on November 16.
Featured image via Regency.