Jordan Peele’s ‘Nope’ Trailer Teases Signs Of Fire In The Sky

I am amused that, like M. Night Shyamalan (who also became a marquee filmmaker with a handful of original, high-concept, star-driven horror movies), Jordan Peele’s third breakout flick will also apparently be focused on aliens and/or an alien invasion in a small part of rural America. While Sixth Sense wasn’t Shyamalan’s first film (it was preceded by Pray With Anger and Wide Awake), it was the one that put him on the map and he followed it up with Unbreakable (Shyamalan does superheroes) and Signs (Shyamalan does aliens).

Now we have the first teaser trailer, dropping not during the Super Bowl but eight hours ago at midnight, for Nope. Jordan Peele’s third directorial effort, starring Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun, Brandon Perea and (most intriguingly) Michael Wincott, is apparently “Peele does aliens.” Needless to say, this isn’t “thing bad,” as I’d no more expect a (presumably good) Jordan Peele film to resemble an (arguably excellent) M. Night Shyamalan film than I would expect a Spike Lee New York story to play like a Woody Allen New York story.

I talk a lot about Shyamalan in relation to Peele, mostly because of how their careers as feature filmmakers began and Peele’s even more unlikely place as a marquee director who can nab huge grosses sans a franchise or an IP. It was impressive when Shyalaman’s first four Disney-distributed flicks pulled blockbuster grosses. Now Peele’s relative success feels like a glitch in the matrix. Moreover, to the extent I refer to Peele the “next Shyamalan,” that’s partially because he’s very much his own filmmaker with his own signatures.

You make more money from the first Harry Potter than from the “next Harry Potter,” and as evidence look at the pile of dead franchises (Spiderwick Chronicles, Dark is Rising, Percy Jackson, etc.) left in its wake. The true “next Harry Potter” was Twilight, a harlequin horror romance that had very little in common with Harry Potter save for the YA fantasy sandbox. Most of the “next Twilight” flicks (The Host, Beautiful Creatures, I Am Number Four, etc.) died badly.

The “next Twilight” was The Hunger Games, a film series that had little in common with either the boy wizard or the vampire lovers. if anything Katniss Everdeen’s action hero/reluctant resistance hero was sold as a counterpoint to Bella Swann’s more romantic inclinations. Meanwhile, Divergent, The Mortal Instruments, The Giver and Vampire Academy flamed out or were DOA.

That Peele may be “the next Shyamalan” is A) a compliment and B) a reminder that Peele is also “the first Peele.” Nope may be partially about reclaiming cowboy/western imagery which has been mostly dominated by white filmmakers and white pop culture. Kaluuya riding horseback trying to outrun what may be an alien spaceship may be as much a reclamation as Michael B. Jordan doing a righteous training montage in the third act of Creed.

At its best, Misha Green’s Lovecraft Country (which lists Peele among its producers) was an episode-by-episode example of Black stars like Jonathan Majors, Jurnee Smollett and Aunjanue Ellis getting to play in genre sandboxes (period-piece action epics, haunted house films, body horror fantasies, etc.) dominated by white filmmakers. Beyond that, it looks like a hell of a thriller.

At the very least, it’s clear that Nope (which was partially shot on IMAX) is a production value/budget upgrade from even the $5 million Get Out and the $20 million Us. If anything, part of the trailer is showing off that this film is on a bigger scale than even Us. I don’t know the budget, and I’d wager something closer to the $40 million James Wan got for Malignant.

To be fair, Malignant might have been a hit in non-Covid times and was arguably a down payment on Wan coming back for Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. Truth be told, Peele is probably the only director left outside of maybe Chris Nolan and Quentin Tarantino who would commercially justify the $60-$80 million budgets for outright original genre flicks that Shyamalan got in the 2000’s.

Nope (“Not from planet Earth”?) opens July 22, 2022, and I’m half-hopeful that this is the only marketing we get from the Universal release until maybe Jurassic World: Dominion in early-June. The film is almost certain to be the year’s biggest wholly original live-action domestic grosser, as was Get Out in 2017 and Us in 2019. I mean, hell, with Turning Red going to Disney+ and Strange Worlds liking facing a “loss leader for Disney+” existence, Nope may be the biggest-grossing original period.