After delivering Suicide Squad to the DC Extended Universe last year, director David Ayer quickly reunited with Will Smith to work on the Netflix film Bright, which melds Ayer's crime story sensibilities with the fantasy genre. Following the 30-second teaser that was released in February during the Oscars, Netflix has finally dropped the first full-length for Bright during the San Diego Comic-Con festivities, and it's packed with action and plenty of story details.
Bright is set on a present day Earth a lot like ours, with a key exception: it's populated with fantastical creatures that you would normally see in Lord of the Rings or another more traditional fantasy tale, like orcs, fairies and elves. Our main protagonist is Will Smith's Scott Ward, a Los Angeles cop who is paired with "diversity hire" Nick Jakoby, an orc played by It Comes At Night's Joel Edgerton. Scott and Nick's partnership gets off to a rocky start, and this is representative of the social divide between the humans and this Earth's other intelligent creatures. But these two will need to deal with their issues quickly, as Los Angeles has been hit with a strange threat.
When Scott and Nick find a young elf named Tikka (played by 11.22.63's Lucy Fry) in a building containing glowing, charred corpses, they discover that she's armed with a magic wand that will grant any wish you want. Even though magic exists on this Earth, too, this wand contains power the likes of which have never been seen before. With the mystical tool now out in the open, others will try to steal it for themselves, leaving it to Scott and Nick to keep Tikka safe and make sure that wand doesn't end up in the wrong hands. Needless to say that during the ensuing chaos, bodies will fall and property will be destroyed.
Although Bright was initially primed to be picked up by Warner Bros for a theatrical release, Netflix was able to acquire the movie, and judging by this trailer, the company put that $90 million budget to good use. Combining fantasy tropes with gunfire and car chases, Bright looks like it will be Netflix's biggest blockbuster-style original movie yet. At the very least, it promises to be a visually stunning movie for folks to enjoy during the Christmas season.
Written by Chronicle's Max Landis, Bright will be available on Netflix starting December 22, and you can also browse through our guide to find out what other material the streaming service has coming up for the rest of 2017.
