Ah, we just passed Labor Day which means the summer movie season is over and it’s time for awards movie season to start. The smell of earnestness, the crack of Oscar-bait. For one of the early contenders, we have a new trailer for the December release Collateral Beauty, which has a bevy of acclaimed actors onboard and a freshly Oscar-winning producer. It’s exactly the kind of movie Academy voters will look at closely, and if anyone has been angling for that shiny, gold, bald, naked statue, it’s Will Smith. Could this be the year?
The trailer makes it known that the producer of the film, Michael Sugar, won an Oscar for Spotlight, but the writer and director aren’t quite as prestigious. Writer Allan Loeb wrote things like The Dilemma, Just Go with It, and Here Comes the Boom, while director David Frankel is the man behind Marley & Me and The Devil Wears Prada. Nothing wrong with any of those things, just more to point out that this is a movie that seems poised to soar on the strength of its cast, and it truly has an impressive lineup.
Will Smith stars as an ad exec who has suffered a horrible tragedy which causes him to question what he calls the three pillars of humanity, what connects each and every person on Earth: Love, Time, and Death. People in his life (Edward Norton, Kate Winslet, Michael Pena) all seem to be dealing with one of these, which leads Smith to send letters to the concept of them. What luck! They respond. Death comes in the form of Helen Mirren, Love in the form of Keira Knightley, and Time in the form of Jacob Latimore. There’s an air of magical realism to everything in the trailer, grounded by Smith’s very real sense of grief. This is bound to be a tear-jerker.
The cast is bound to elevate this movie to a higher level, which is what the studio is surely banking on. Whether the movie is truly worth Oscars or if it’s just baiting them shamelessly is something we’ll all have to figure out come December 16. What do you think of this new trailer? Let us know in the comments below!
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Image: Warner Bros/New Line
Kyle Anderson is the Associate Editor for Nerdist. You can find more of his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!
