‘Judas And The Black Messiah’ Teaser Shows Warner Bros. Still Cuts The Best Trailers In Hollywood

We got a teaser trailer for Judas and the Black Messiah on Thursday night, which was a surprise since getting any new theatrical trailer these days is cause for celebration. The Warner Bros. release, about the FBI’s attempts to bring down Black Panther party chairman Fred Hampton in the late 1960’s, stars Daniel Kaluuya as Hampton, Lakeith Stanfield as “turncoat” William O’Neal and Jesse Plemons as the cop who corralled O’Neal into becoming an informant, is scheduled to open at some point next year. As for the trailer, it’s a dynamite piece of movie marketing, something that will play quite well on an IMAX screen prior to showings of Tenet and yet another example of Warner Bros. marketing at its best. It’s a trip wire-intense trailer for a non-tentpole that nonetheless sells the flick as an event movie.

The brief tease is centered around a single scene, namely Hampton preaching to the proverbially converted and calling for revolution while the narrative shifts in and out of that core moment to provide context on the moment in time and the specific narrative, climaxing with a brief “action” montage before returning to the same key moment, with Kaluuya calling for revolution, liberation and freedom as Stanfield nervously applauds while Plemons watches in the crowd. It’s such a powerhouse trailer that it’s really all you need to make the sale, although I’m sure there will be a more conventional plot-centric trailer dropping sometime before release. If the structure seems similar, it’s because it plays not unlike “lightning in a bottle” teasers for Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper in 2015 and Bradley Cooper’s A Star Is Born in 2018.

The Clint Eastwood-directed war actioner was framed entirely around a single sequence, in this case its Bradley Cooper’s protagonist debating whether to snipe a young boy who may or may not be intending to blow up U.S. troops. This razor’s edge moment is intercut with biographical snippets (marriage, childbirth, injured friends, etc.) that metaphorically show Kris Kyle’s life that led to this specific coin toss moral dilemma. Does he take the shot? Well, you have to see the movie to find out. Eastwood’s Richard Jewell tried a similar structure, with an interrogation by Jon Ham’s FBI agent of Paul Walter Hauser’s Jewell being intercut with “the story up to this point” snippets. Ditto Lionsgate’s teaser for Peter Berg’s oil spill disaster flick Deepwater Horizon. Neither quite hit the same button because there was no cliffhanger and no moral dilemma.

The teaser for Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga’s A Star Is Born, released in June of 2018, was such a knockout that WB never released another one before the movie opened in October. The teaser, using two songs (“Maybe It’s Time” and “Shallow”), turns the film’s first act into a stand-alone feature, culminating with Jackson Maine inviting Ally on stage to sing one of her own songs, which she thrillingly knocks out of the park. The big musical moment (“I’m off the deep end, look how I dive in..!”) kicks off a montage of otherwise conventional trailer beats, creating a spoiler-free trailer and crafting the impression that this singular moment is “only the beginning” of their romance. The movie arguably suggests that it was all downhill from there, but nobody said movie marketing had to be 100% truthful.

If there’s one thing that Warner Bros. does consistently better than any other major studio, it’s in crafting blockbuster-sized trailers for non-franchise films. When it works, the effect is being able to sell a non-franchise/non-tentpole movie as a “must see this in theaters” event movie. It was neat that they opened Chris Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises to $160 million domestic in July of 2012, and the third trailer for that one is perhaps my favorite Batman trailer ever. But it was even more impressive that they opened Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike, a $7 million economic mobility dramedy starring Channing Tatum as a male stripper, to $39 million a month prior. Ditto their periodic ability to turn non-franchise films like A Star Is Born ($434 million), American Sniper ($550 million) and Gravity ($724 million) into true events.

It’s not just WB mind you, as Universal’s Ted and Fifty Shades of Grey would like a word. Nor am I remotely saying that Judas and the Black Messiah is going to end up flirting with Last Samurai ($456 million) or Troy ($490 million)-level numbers. I’m assuming that the true-life drama, penned by Will Berson and Shaka King, produced by Ryan Coogler and directed by King, is budgeted at a level where Magic Mike-level grosses ($167 million worldwide) would be an unmitigated success and a final cume between Just Mercy ($50 million) and A Dolphin Tale ($95 million) would be good enough. But the firecracker intensity of the trailer, and how effectively it details the core moral dilemma while giving away almost nothing, reminds me that nobody cuts event movie trailers for non-tentpole films quite like Warner Bros.