The key to a good teaser poster is to give only a hint of what you've got in store. When you're bringing a remake or a sequel, that hint can be incredibly small, just a quick tip of the hat to fans and a placeholder for what's to come. That's exactly the tactic for this teaser poster for Oldboy, Spike Lee's remake of the modern Korean classic that's coming to theaters on October 11. Those hash marks add up to 20, which is the exact amount of time our main character spends kidnapped for reasons that elude him into the film's final, horrible moments.
The poster first appeared at CinemaCon, the annual gathering of movie theater owners that Eric is covering for us this year, and where nearly all the major studios show up to trumpet their biggest new releases (in fact, Eric snapped a photo of this poster on the convention floor, along with lots of others you can find at that link). Oldboy, which is coming from FilmDistrict, isn't exactly your usual high-profile film. A remake from the highly idiosyncratic Spike Lee that many of us assumed would be a bad idea from the start, Oldboy-- if it stays faithful to the original Park Chan-wook film-- will be violent and disturbing and strange, all the kinds of things that American studios usually try to avoid. And though stars Elizabeth Olsen, Josh Brolin and Sharlto Copley are incredibly talented, they're not the kinds of names that sell movies, either.
But then, that's all the more reason to be interested in Oldboy, which at the very least, with the participation of Spike Lee, will not be a pure carbon copy of the Korean original. You can read the film's official synopsis below, and click here for everything else we know about it.
OLDBOY follows the story of an advertising executive (Josh Brolin) who is kidnapped and held hostage for 20 years in solitary confinement without any indication of his captor’s motive. When he is inexplicably released, he embarks on an obsessive mission to discover who orchestrated his bizarre and torturous punishment only to find he is still trapped in a web of conspiracy and torment. His quest for revenge leads him into an ill-fated relationship with a young social worker (Elizabeth Olsen) and ultimately to an elusive man (Sharlto Copley) who allegedly holds the key to his salvation.
