Fans of Lois Lowry's award-winning book The Giver were quick to point out a serious problem with the trailer for Phillip Noyce's adaptation that debuted last month: despite the fact that the entire world of The Giver is in black and white, an extremely important stylistic choice, all of the footage shown was in full color. This stirred up a great deal of ire even here in the Cinema Blend offices, but the good news is that the production seems to have righted its wrong. A brand new featurette from the movie has premiered online via Yahoo! and it reveals that a great deal of the film will in fact be in black and white.
Featuring a great cast that includes Jeff Bridges and Meryl Streep, The Giver centers on a young man named Jonas (Brenton Thwaites) who lives in what in what many believe is a utopia. A world far different from our own, the society has been purged all of all emotion, history and even color (hence the black and white). When Jonas comes of age, he learns that he will play an incredibly vital role in the community, serving in a position known as The Receiver of Memory - the one man who is responsible for actually keeping track of history. He becomes a protege to the previous Receiver of Memories (Jeff Bridges) - now known as The Giver - and begins to understand and see the world for how it really is. Unfortunately, all of this knowledge also comes with the burden of knowing the horrible secrets that allow the society to function. Alexander Skarsgard, Taylor Swift, and Katie Holmes co-star.
This featurette does make me wonder: was the movie actually going to be in black and white before the trailer dropped and everyone complained, or was the first trailer just a misrepresentation of the material? It's possible that the people behind the marketing didn't think that a mostly black and white movie would attract the younger audiences its needs, and just used colorized versions of all the footage. That being said, Sam Raimi's Oz The Great And Powerful used both black and white and color clips in their trailers, and that film went on to make nearly $500 million worldwide.
The Giver will be in theaters on August 15th. You can watch the premiere trailer for the movie below:
