This ain’t nothin’ but a trailer for Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis biopic
Elvis, starring Austin Butler and Tom Hanks, on June 24
Even before it comes out, The Great Gatsby director Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis biopic is already an important pop culture artifact: It is, after all, the film Tom Hanks was making when he got COVID, one of the things (along with the NBA season shutting down) that convinced Americans to take the virus seriously… for about five minutes.
But now, after a few delays, the film finally has a full trailer, giving us all a chance to see if it was worth all of this trouble. The film stars Austin Butler as Elvis, with a prosthetic-covered Tom Hanks playing his manager, Tom Parker. They get most of the focus in this trailer (good luck finding one shot that Butler’s Elvis isn’t in), but the movie also stars Oliva DeJonge, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Luke Bracey, and Maggie Gyllenhaal.
The film seems like it’s going to cover a wide range of events from Elvis’ life, with this trailer showing him as a kid, as a hip-wiggling young man, and as an older performer with a Las Vegas residency. That covers most of the Elvis variations that they have, save for maybe Elvis in the army and Elvis in movies (though this is a movie about Elvis, so maybe that counts).
But we would be remiss if we didn’t mention just how similar this trailer is to the biopic-skewering Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, and not just because Butler’s Elvis sometimes resembles Jack White’s karate Elvis from that movie. It’s got the singer as a kid learning he has special music powers, it’s got teens losing their minds when he does one suggestive thing, and it’s got the dramatic inclusion of important historical figures. This doesn’t necessarily mean that Elvis will be bad, but it does mean that Walk Hard is a masterpiece that just gets better with time.
Elvis will be in theaters on June 24, and Variety says it will open on HBO Max 45 days later (part of the new not-day-and-date release strategy).