Usama Masood Ahmad |
Disney has begun to promote the live-action Aladdin movie by releasing the first official trailer. The two minute, fourteen-second trailer comes after the studio released a teaser trailer a few months back that wasn’t received as positively as they would have liked.
The new trailer will likely sway the naysayers as it offers plenty of reasons as to why we should check out the story of Disney’s first Middle Eastern Prince and Princess. The new trailer showed a bit more of the plot of the movie including shots of the beautiful city and Aladdin discovering the Genie with the help of the villainous Jafar.
The film also shows us Jasmine in all her royal majesty and finally, finally gives us our first glimpse of the iconic “A Whole New World” scene which sounds pretty great. The film is set to feature some new tracks including some original raps by Will Smith so it will be interesting to see if it releases some new footage and tracks sometime soon.
Read more: ‘Jurassic’ dinos shake the North American box office
The film stars newcomer Mena Massoud, Naomi Scott, of Power Rangers and the upcoming Charlie’s Angels, Marwan Kanzari, Billy Magnussen, Nasim Pedrad and Will Smith. While many are waiting to see how the live action love story of Aladdin and Jasmine unfolds on screen, eyes are also on Will Smith’s Genie whose disastrous appearance in the first teaser trailer made the movie and his character, the subject of numerous memes.
Disney was quick to point out that the Computer Generated Images (CGI) in the trailer would look significantly better in the film and this new trailer has certainly shown the improvement. That said, Smith’s rapping Genie could prove to be a distraction and it will be interesting to see if the only A-list star in the film brings down the film.
My bet is that the movie is going to use a “less is more” with Smith going forward, meaning that Smith’s Genie won’t be as heavily featured in the promotional campaign as we would have expected. The original animated movie made more than $500 million worldwide and this was way back in 1992 so we can expect big things from the live-action musical film.
Read more: ‘Spider-man: Into The Spider-Verse’, movie of the year
Disney has so far enjoyed great success by converting its animated classics to live action features and it will be interesting to see if Aladdin (a more eastern looking film) does as well. Aladdin could also stumble if director Guy Ritchie isn’t as faithful to the source material as Disney fans would like. The director has not been as lucky with his last two films Man from U.N.C.L.E and King Arthur underperforming greatly at the box office.
The film is expected to release in summer 2019 worldwide, just before the photorealistic computer animated remake of The Lion King.
Usama Masood Ahmad is an entertainment writer and research analyst at Global Village Space. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Global Village Space’s editorial policy.