Netflix, we have one question and one question only: Where is The Old Guard 2? How much longer must we wait?
It’s still somewhere in the distant future, apparently, as it’s not on the streamer’s 2023 movie preview, which is full of explosions and corny dialogue, and the occasional glimpse of something intriguing—by which I mostly mean mere seconds of Sam Esmail’s adaptation of Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind.
I am sorry to report, though, that despite the screen that shows a bunch of cyberattacks, Julia Roberts is not going to fight hackers like some kind of 1990s Sandra Bullock character. Leave the World Behind takes place against a backdrop of mysterious happenings, but is largely a character study—and a study in unease and uncertainty. With Mr. Robot creator Esmail at the helm, I can only imagine the movie will be even more stressful than the novel when we get to watch it December 8th.
There’s not a lot of SFF on offer in this clip reel, though we do get a quick look at They Cloned Tyrone, out July 21 (there’s more in the teaser, if you’re intrigued), and the Millie Bobby Brown-starring Damsel, which looks less than impressive. (The cast, on the other hand, offers a trio of reasons to give the movie a chance: Angela Bassett, Robin Wright, and Shohreh Aghdashloo.)
We get just a brief look at Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon, in which the director continues using his signature blend of flat colors, shouting, and slow-motion violence. Netflix execs say, “He thinks of it as his take on making something like Star Wars.”
What we don’t get to see here is as intriguing as what we do. Netflix’s 2023 slate also includes a handful of films that don’t get have sneak peeks or release dates, including a pile of animated films: Chicken Run sequel Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget; the Nimona adaptation; an adaptation of Kate DiCamillo’s The Magician’s Elephant; and The Monkey King, starring the voices of Jimmy O. Yang, Bowen Yang, Stephanie Hsu, and BD Wong, among others. There’s also Spaceman, based on Jaroslav Kalfar’s novel Spaceman of Bohemia, and an untitled Wes Anderson movie that adapts several Roald Dahl stories, including “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar.”
