Trailers of the week: Captain America, F1, and Gladiator II
There’s a bit of a theme of payoff in this week’s trailers. Anthony Mackie finally takes the lead on the big screen after 10 years in the MCU; Ridley Scott’s two-decade-plus plan for a Gladiator sequel is coming to fruition; and we finally get to find out what happens next to the macrodata refinement team in Severance.
There’s a lot to go through this week, from big-budget tentpole movies to whimsical TV, so let’s get down to it, starting, naturally, with the MCU.
Captain America: Brave New World
In the trailer for Captain America: Brave New World, Thaddeus Ross (Harrison Ford) wants to make Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) part of the US military once more. He’s clearly put off by the idea, but is forced to jump into the fray after super soldier Isaiah Bradley attacks the President.
Mackie’s first MCU film as the lead character (and, it seems, the first appearance of Red Hulk!) hits theaters on January 14th, 2025, so you have time to catch up on The Falcon and the Winter Soldier before its debut.
F1
Apple and Warner Bros’ expensive new F1 isn’t due in US theaters until June 27th, 2025, but it’s already got a teaser trailer with plenty of racing footage. Brad Pitt stars as Sonny Hayes, a veteran driver who’s been out of the game since a bad crash in the 1990s but is convinced to return to the circuit as a mentor for Joshua Pearse (Damson Idris).
The movie sounds like it’s every bit as bombastic as director Joseph Kosinski’s Top Gun: Maverick. Not only did Pitt and Idris actually drive cars for the movie, but much of the filming took place at actual Formula 1 races.
Gladiator II
Ridley Scott’s long-awaited Gladiator sequel sees Lucius Verus (Paul Mescal), the nephew of Emperor Commodus from the first film, grown up and with no memory of his mother, Lucilla (Connie Nielsen) — though he does remember the rebellion of Russell Crowe’s Maximus. Now enslaved himself and inspired by Maximus, Lucius takes up with Macrinus (Denzel Washington) to carry out his own uprising, his goal nothing short of the fall of Rome.
Gladiator II also stars Pedro Pascal, Joseph Quinn, Fred Hechinger, and opens on November 22nd.
Time Bandits
Taika Waititi’s take on Time Bandits looks like it’ll have the fantastical pseudo-realism of the Terry Gilliam movie it’s based on, but with some changes to the formula — the biggest one being that the Time Bandits themselves are no longer played by little people.
Otherwise, the premise is basically the same: a young boy finds himself flitting across time on an adventure with a band of time-hopping thieves. Lisa Kudrow, Rune Temte, Kal-El Tuck, Tadhg Murphey, Kiera Thompson, and more star in the Apple TV Plus series, which premiers on July 24th.
Agatha All Along
In WandaVision spinoff Agatha All Along, Rio Vidal (Aubrey Plaza) helps Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) emerge from an illusion that had her believing she was a detective trying to solve a mysterious murder. Yet she finds that the witchy powers she had in WandaVision are gone, and she needs to pull together a coven to regain them. Agatha All Along starts streaming September 18th on Disney Plus.
Severance
Severance season two is finally coming. It’s been over two years since the cliffhanger ending of the bizarro sci-fi office thriller’s first season. Now, the new season is set for a January 17th premiere on Apple TV Plus. If you haven’t seen the show, don’t worry: the teaser that Apple released earlier this week shows characters Mark (Adam Scott), Helly (Britt Lower), Dylan (Zach Cherry), and Irving (John Turturro), but doesn’t spoil anything about it.
