2018 is a good year for Fast and Furious stars fighting giant animals.
In Rampage, which comes out this Friday, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson teams up with an oversized albino gorilla to fight a massive crocodile and an equally gargantuan flying werewolf. Later this glorious year, we also get The Meg, in which Jason Statham — the Decker to the Rock’s Hobbs (they’re getting a spinoff) — faces his greatest challenge yet: a megalodon shark.
Based on Steve Alten’s book Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror, The Meg had a long journey to the big screen (Disney, which originally optioned the rights, held off when the deepest, bluest, hat-is-like-a-shark’s-fin movie ever, Deep Blue Sea, came out, and Oscar winner Guillermo del Toro was slated to direct at one point; the honor eventually went to National Treasure‘s Jon Turteltaub), but it’s finally almost here. And it looks ridiculous (I mean that as a total compliment).
Here’s the official plot synopsis.
In the film, a deep-sea submersible — part of an international undersea observation program — has been attacked by a massive creature, previously thought to be extinct, and now lies disabled at the bottom of the deepest trench in the Pacific… with its crew trapped inside. With time running out, expert deep sea rescue diver Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham) is recruited by a visionary Chinese oceanographer (Winston Chao), against the wishes of his daughter Suyin (Li Bingbing), to save the crew—and the ocean itself—from this unstoppable threat: a pre-historic 75-foot-long shark known as the Megalodon. What no one could have imagined is that, years before, Taylor had encountered this same terrifying creature. Now, teamed with Suyin, he must confront his fears and risk his own life to save everyone trapped below…bringing him face to face once more with the greatest and largest predator of all time.
The Meg opens on August 10.
