Later this year, director Antoine Fuqua’s remake of the classic Western, The Magnificent Seven will gallop into theaters with Denzel Washington and Chris Pratt in the leading roles. Now, the first trailer has arrived and movie fans have a chance to see how the third iteration of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai will play out on screen.
Like its predecessors, The Magnificent Seven focuses on a group of mercenaries who are called upon to free a town from its oppressors. In this film, Peter Sarsgaard is playing the big bad, Bartholomew Bogue. Now there’s a name that was clearly meant for a villain!
The trailer puts most of its focus on Washington’s character, a bounty hunter named Sam Chisolm, as he puts together the rest of the team. But Pratt’s Josh Farraday also gets a fair amount of time in these brief teaser scenes. The rest of the team includes Ethan Hawke as a sharpshooter with the unlikely name of Goodnight Robicheaux; Martin Sensmeier as a Comanche warrior called Red Harvest; Lee Byung-hun as an assassin named Billy Rocks; Manuel Garcia Rulfo as an outlaw named Vasquez; and Vincent D’Onofrio as Jack Horne… a trapper.
You may be wondering why The Magnificent Seven is getting a remake 56 years after the original film came out. This is actually a project that’s been floating around at MGM for the last four years, with several different stars who dropped in and out of the film. One of its big selling points is the script by True Detective screenwriter Nic Pizzolatto and Richard Wenk, as well as the fact that it is the third film collaboration between Washington and Fuqua. Whatever your feelings about remakes are, that’s a pretty solid creative team.
The Magnificent Seven will head into movie theaters on September 23.
What did you think about this trailer? Let us know in the comment section below!
Image: MGM
