Last summer Disney, and their subsidiary DreamWorks, had one of the biggest hits of the summer and of the entire year with The Help, which is pretty much the opposite of everything you usually expect from the word "summer movie." It was a good lesson in counterprogramming, and realizing that just because people are going to the movie theater for the air conditioning and kids are out of school doesn't mean movies have to be aggressively dumb, aggressively loud, or even all that aggressive at all.
This summer they're trying something similar again with People Like Us, a film from a writer and director who knows his way around big blockbusters-- Alex Kurtzman wrote the first two Transformers movies and Star Trek, among others-- but who's making a pretty big change of pace for his directorial debut. He's brought in Star Trek's Chris Pine to play a man suffering from debt who learns his father has died and left him $150,000-- to give to a sister (Elizabeth Banks) he didn't know existed. Michelle Pfeiffer, Olivia Wilde and Jon Favreau round out the impressive cast, and though the trailer gave us a good sense of the drama and characters involved, there's now a feaurette that delves more into Kurtzman's reasons for telling this particular story. Take a look below, or watch it at Apple in HD.
A new poster also premiered at Apple, and in case you doubted that Kurtzman as a director was as fond of "magic hour" as his Transformers collaborator Michael Bay, just look at the twinkling backlight in the poster and see for yourself. People Like Us opens June 29, and though it might look a little cheesy here, I'm actually hearing it's pretty good. In any case, it's opening opposite Magic Mike and G.I. Joe: Retaliation, so if for some reason you're against Channing Tatum this summer, this sounds like a good option.
