New trailer for The Rock and Chris Evans' festive action movie Red One suggests it won’t be a wonderful Christmas time
Amazon MGM Studios' Santa-in-peril movie hopes to be the beginning of a holiday-themed franchise
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
AmazonMGM Studios has released the trailer forRed One, its festive-themed action comedy starring Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans. Thenew movie, which will be released in theaters on November 15, is hoped to be the beginning of a brand new franchise that reimagines and has fun with various holiday-related mythologies.
The film stars Johnson as Callum Drift, head of security at the North Pole. When Santa Claus – the Red One of the title, played by JK Simmons – is kidnapped, Drift must team up with infamous bounty hunter Jack O’Malley (Evans) to rescue Santa and save Christmas. The trailer’s fun, although the sight of multiple evil snowmen with generous buttocks may give you nightmares like one of thebest horror movies.
Red One: what we know so far
Amazon MGM Studios clearly has high hopes forRed One: it showed off footage from the movie at Las Vegas’s CinemaCon earlier this year, urging attendees not to reveal the plot. But the movie hasn’t been without its troubles.
Red Onewas originally planned for a 2023 Christmas release. Its delay was blamed on the writer’s and actors' strikes, but according toThe Wrapthere’s much more to it than that. The Wrap quotes “insiders” who claim that Johnson would turn up eight hours late to work and act in various unsavory ways on set; that a “perfect storm of problems” sent the budget into orbit; and that the shoot was plagued by problems stemming from the filmmakers' inexperience. And according to entertainment journalistJeff Sneider, the film didn’t come out last Christmas because it was “a big lump of coal… an unmitigated disaster” featuring leads with zero chemistry.
Amazon has denied the allegations and also says that “our testing has been very strong – the reaction from CinemaCon speaks for itself”.
There’s certainly a lot going on in the trailer, which features Krampus, the headless horseman and those aforementioned snow monsters. But visually it looks a lot more scary than you’d expect from the synopsis, and the vibe here seems as much Christmas horror movie – thinkViolent Night– as it is comedy.
Horror comedy is a tough genre to pull off, especially if you’re trying to create not just one of thebest Christmas moviesbut what one of the trailer’sYouTubecommenters brilliantly calls “the Christmas Cinematic Universe”. And with the release date some way off, it looks like it’ll be a while before we know whether The Rock’s been cooking up a Christmas cracker or a total turkey.
Get the best Black Friday deals direct to your inbox, plus news, reviews, and more.
Sign up to be the first to know about unmissable Black Friday deals on top tech, plus get all your favorite TechRadar content.
You might also like
Writer, broadcaster, musician and kitchen gadget obsessive Carrie Marshall has been writing about tech since 1998, contributing sage advice and odd opinions to all kinds of magazines and websites as well as writing more than a dozen books. Her memoir,Carrie Kills A Man, is on sale now and her next book, about pop music, is out in 2025. She is the singer in Glaswegian rock bandUnquiet Mind.
4 spy shows on Prime Video with over 80% on Rotten Tomatoes
We just learned more about Max’s password-sharing crackdown – and more price hikes are coming too
Lego will let you build Sir Ernest Shackleton’s iconic lost ship, the Endurance, in its next Icons set
