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26th Apr 2023

Just three more months until the greatest movie ever made is released in cinemas

Rory Cashin

meg

We are trying to remain calm. Trying and failing.

In the run-up to 2018’s The Meg, we may have gotten a little bit too excited in calling it The Greatest Movie Ever Made in our lengthy preview at the time, especially in hindsight of the film that eventually landed in cinemas, which ending up being just okay.

However, we feel fully justified this time in saying that The Meg 2: The Trench will absolutely be The Greatest Movie Ever Made, off the back of the first teaser trailer that was screened on Tuesday night in Las Vegas for the crowds attending CinemaCon.

Fandom writer Eric Goldman took to Twitter with his initial reaction:

“Jason Stratham says “That’s the biggest Meg anyone’s ever seen!” in the trailer for The Meg 2, which begins with a Meg killing a dinosaur. They’re hunting in packs this time! Stratham is fighting them! I’m so in!”

The Wrap then describes the next part of the trailer as follows: “Deep underwater, the team starts getting picked off by the biggest meg anyone has ever seen. We then get various monsters attacking by land and by sea, with Jason Statham almost getting eaten by a shark. We get more scenes of tourists almost getting eaten, and a tentacled creature eating a helicopter. The teaser ends with Statham leaping into the air on a jetski to face off against a shark with a sword.”

So we’ve got packs of giant sharks, T-Rexes, giant squids eating helicopters, Jason Statham on a jetski with a sword, oh, and the whole trailer is set to Heart’s hit 1977 single ‘Barracuda’… This. Is. Cinema!

The sequel is directed by Ben Wheatley (Kill List, Free Fire), with Statham joined on screen by Cliff Curtis (Hobbs & Shaw), Sienna Guillory (Love Actually), and Wu Ching, who is arguably China’s biggest movie star right now. It is this final cast member that could see the sequel make an absolute killing at the global box office. The first Meg movie made $530 million globally, with $155 million of that coming from China alone, where Hollywood movies have been doing less and less well lately.

And if this goes really well, who knows, there are actually EIGHT books in the Meg series (yes, they were books first, believe it or not), so this could end up being a franchise to rival Godzilla and Kong… or considering they’re actually all Warner Bros. movies… a magnificent kind of crossover?? We can but dream.

The Meg 2: The Trench is currently scheduled to arrive in Irish and UK cinemas on Friday, 4 August.

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