This week saw some fun trailers tapping into heady science fiction, comic book movies, and taboo horror, each with a fun mixed genre twist. Joker: Folie à Deux is a comic book movie about the love affair of The Joker and Harley Quinn that’s also a musical, and Apple TV Plus’ new Dark Matter series is a kidnapping thriller with an interesting alternate reality twist. Then there’s Maxxxine, a horror slasher that looks to also be a whodunit crime mystery.
Joker: Folie à Deux takes a crack at the origin of The Joker and Harley Quinn’s romance, which has been explored in some of the best episodes of Batman: The Animated Series and lightly featured in 2016’s Suicide Squad. This movie is supposed to be a “jukebox musical” — you know, like Moulin Rouge, except it’s about a murderous pair of lovers with unconventional ideas about jokes. It will be out on October 4th.
Dark Matter’s physicist main character is kidnapped and pulled into another reality by a parallel version of himself. It stars Joel Edgerton, Jennifer Connelly, Alice Braga, Jimmi Simpson, Dayo Okeniyi, and Oakes Fegley, and it will be out on May 8th on Apple TV Plus. Apple has had some absolute science fiction bangers — my personal favorites have been For All Mankind and Hello Tomorrow!, and I’m enjoying Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, too (though I haven’t made it through that one quite yet). It starts streaming on May 8th.
Maxxxine is the third movie in a trilogy that follows an adult film star named Maxine Minx (Mia Goth), who is trying to get into Hollywood proper against the backdrop of a serial killer called “the night stalker.” Like the previous movies, X and Pearl, it takes on a specific decade, this time the 1980s. Maxxxine also stars Elizabeth Debicki, Moses Sumney, Michelle Monaghan, Bobby Cannavale, Halsey, Lily Collins, Giancarlo Esposito, and Kevin Bacon. It’s out on July 5th.
Another Apple movie, Fly Me to the Moon imagines Scarlett Johannson as a marketing executive named Kelly Jones who has been hired by NASA to film a fake Moon landing just in case the real one goes south. Channing Tatum stars as launch director Cole Davis, who is in charge of making the real landing happen. And of course, the trailer can’t resist a nod to the longstanding conspiracy theory that Stanley Kubrick filmed the first Apollo Moon landing. Its other stars include Anna Garcia, Jim Rash, Noah Robbins, Ray Romano, and Woody Harrelson, and it comes to theaters on July 12th.
