A Look Inside the Sony CinemaCon Presentation

Read on for a full recap of the 2017 Sony CinemaCon presentation

Sony Pictures kicked off CinemaCon 2017 with a look a their upcoming slate, including films like Baby Driver, The Dark Tower, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle and lots more! Read on for our full recap of the Sony CinemaCon presentation and check back between now and Thursday for more studio presentations and talent interviews!

We’ve updated our CinemaCon gallery with new Spider-Man promo images showcased after the Sony presentation. There’s also a look at a special Spider-Man hoodie that handed out to congoers. Check it out all at the bottom of this page!

The presentation opened with the first scene from Edgar Wright‘s latest, Baby Driver, with Wright himself joining stars Ansel Elgort and Jon Hamm to announce that the film, previously set for an August 11 release, will now hit theaters on Wednesday, June 28.

Described by Wright as “a car movie driven by music,” Baby Driver stars Elgort as Baby, a getaway driver who lost his parents at a young age in the same accident that gave him tinnitus. To drown out the ringing in his ears, Baby constructs track lists (gathered from iPods recovered in car robberies) that he listens do during jobs. The film itself features 35 songs covering (per Wright) “all of the action and some of the drama.” It remains to be seen what all 35 of those tracks are, but the first one is “Bellbottoms” by the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.

The scene opens as Baby, driving a bright red car, pulls up to an Atlanta bank. Hamm’s character, along with those played by Jon Bernthal and Eiza González, get out and enter while Baby listens to his headphones, tapping the steering wheel in sync with the song, beating a water bottle against the dashboard and flipping on the windshield wipers in perfect rhythm to the music.

As the lyrics repeat “Bellbottoms,” the crew rushes from the bank and into Baby’s car. Baby immediately drives backwards, spinning the car around to right it. He makes a sharp turn as a police cruiser begins to pursue. He’s going faster than 80mph, swerving through the alley as we saw in the trailer. Ahead, another cop is laying down a barricade to destroy Baby’s tires. Baby swerves around it, however, and the earlier cop winds up driving straight into it.

Now there are five cops in a triangle formation, right on Baby’s bumper. He turns the wrong direction onto an offramp and makes it to the highway. There, he matches paces with two other red cars and, as they go under an overpass, he changes lanes. To the police watching from a pursuing helicopter, it’s like a giant game of three-card Monte and Baby is able to slip away and leave the chopper following the other two cars.

It seems like the cops have been lost, but suddenly Baby sees one up ahead at the end of the alley he’s racing down. The cop doesn’t see him, though, and pulls away as the light changes. From there, it’s into a garage where the red car is ditched for another ride just as “Bellbottoms” ends.

Promising no CGI or green screen and actual real-life car chase cinematography, Baby Driver also stars Kevin Spacey, Lily James and Jamie Foxx.

The Sony CinemaCon presentation continued with a look at the Stephen King adaptation, The Dark Tower. A co-production with MRC and Imagine Entertainment, The Dark Tower stars Idris Elba as the gunslinger and Matthew McConaughey as the man in black. Beginning with the onscreen text that opens the novel, “The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed,” a video began by exploring the real world success of the Dark Tower series.

“They say that what happens in one war, echoes in others,” says a voice as the video segued into more of a trailer.

“The war is over,” McConaughey tells Elba. “You’re trying to save the world, but you can’t even save yourself.”

“I kill with my heart,” says the gunslinger. He fires at the man in black, but the villain catches it over his shoulder without batting an eye.

“The tower will fall, Roland,” he says, as he walks away.

Elsewhere, in a contemporary cityscape, Tom Taylor’s young Jake Chambers is talking with psychiatrists. They tell him that what he’s drawing isn’t real, but he seems to be pulling his imagery from somewhere supernatural. We see him enter an abandoned home and move to a sort of portal in the wall. Stepping through, he’s on another world and the gunslinger is there. Jake knows him from the pictures.

“I dreamed about you,” he says. “You were supposed to save the town.”

“That was an old dream,” says the gunslinger.

There’s a lot of quick-cutting action, including quite a bit of stylized gunplay.

“He’s like the devil, isn’t he?” asks Jake.

“No,” says the gunslinger. “The devil is a dog you can kick.”

“Did you tell the kid,” the man in black asks in another scene, taunting the gunslinger. “that whoever walks with you dies by my hand?”

“I will kill him,” the gunslinger swears to Jake in another. “For both of us.”

The footage ended with one last scene. In it, the gunslinger is badly beaten and standing outside at some kind of farmhouse. A woman approaches, but he yells at her to be quiet. He’s listening to something. In the distance, a hanging wrench softly clinks against the side of a barn. Clothes dry on a line. Blood runs down the gunslinger’s arm and gathers for a moment on his knuckles before falling to the dirt.

Suddenly, he fires.

The bullet, we see, has torn through the laundry and several other layers of obstacles and has managed to kill a man who has taken Jake far in the distance.

The Dark Tower also stars Tom Taylor, Claudia Kiim, Fran Kranz, Abbey Lee and Jackie Earle Haley. Look for it to hit the big screen July 28.

Although footage for the films was in various states of completion, the Sony CinemaCon presentation then continued with a look at the upcoming offerings from Sony Pictures Animation, including next month’s Smurfs: the Lost Village alongside The Emoji Movie (August 4), The Star (November 10) and Peter Rabbit (March 23, 2018).

The Sony CinemaCon presentation marked the first look anywhere at the upcoming Peter Rabbit, which will blend live-action actors with (Mr. and Mrs. McGregor and his wife are played by Domhnall Gleeson and Rose Byrne) with voice roles for James Corden, Daisy Ridley, Elizabeth Debicki and Margot Robbie. What’s more, Peter Rabbit will pull other Beatrix Potter favorites into the story, including Benjamin Bunny and Jemima Puddle-Duck.

Beatrix Potter fans should be pleased when the see the final character designs for the film as they are remarkably accurate to Potter’s original watercolors. There is a level of contemporary humor, however, particularly evidenced in the footage with a final logo set to House of Pain’s “Jump Around.”

The production company set to distribute the film internationally, the Sony Pictures presentation continued with Ryan Gosling taking the stage to introduce a new trailer to Blade Runner 2049. Directed by Denis Villeneuve (Arrival, Prisoners), the followup to the 1982 Ridley Scott classic features the return of Harrison Ford and Edward James Olmos alongside Ana de Armas, Sylvia Hoeks, Robin Wright, Mackenzie Davis, Carla Juri, Lennie James, Dave Bautista and Jared Leto.

Similar to The Dark Tower, the Blade Runner footage began with a “real world” look at the impact of the original film.

We see Gosling with a gun. He’s beaten up and standing in the rain. He walks through a city street and down some stairs. He enters a massive building with pyramid-like walls.

“Every civilization was build out of a disposable work force,” says a voice.

Gosling is in a room of replicants that look like alabaster mannequins.

“I make angels,” says a voice. “But I can only make so many. Happy birthday.”

“There is an order to things,” says another. “That’s what we do. We keep order.”

From the teaser, we see Gosling approach Ford.

“You’re a cop,” says Ford. “I had your job once. I was good at it.”

“I know,” says Gosling.

“What do you want?”

“I want to ask you some questions.”

There’s a rush of footage with lots of interesting shots, including Gosling getting blasted with hundreds of gallons of water as he tries to get into his car. There’s a giant holographic woman that points down at him.

“I always told you,” says a voice. “You’re special.”

Gosling is standing in front of a book with a page ripped out.

“You’re story isn’t over yet,” says the voice. “There’s still a page left.”

Look for Blade Runner 2049 to hit theaters on October 6.

Director John Watts then joined producers Kevin Feige and Amy Pascal for a look at Spider-Man: Homecoming. We’re not going to go into a full recap of the new trailer, however, as the full video will be online in a matter of hours. If you’re in a rush to know exactly what was revealed, check out our FB Live recap of the full Sony CinemaCon presentation:

Three quick trailers were showcased back to back. Cadaver kicked things off. It follows a woman, played by Shay Mitchell, who, after taking a job in a morgue, is attacked by bodies who come to life in the night. Next up, Taraji P. Henson plays an assassin in a stylish Proud Mary trailer (set to the Creedence Clearwater Revival song). Finally, we got a peak at the Flatliners remake/sequel (although it was strangely devoid of a title card). Look for Flatliners to arrive this September 29 with Cadaver debuting February 2, 2018. Proud Mary, meanwhile, has not yet been dated.

The Sony CinemaCon presentation wrapped up with Dwayne Johnson taking the stage alongside Jack Black, Nick Jonas, Karen Gillan and, via video feed, Kevin Hart. They revealed that the film’s new title is Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle and the new trailer even references Alan Parrish, the character played by the late Robin Williams in the 1995 original.

The trailer sees four high school kids winding up in detention and then being tasked with cleaning out a school basement. It’s there that they find the Jumanji game which, in this iteration, is a video game system. When they plug it in, they find themselves transported into the game as four different characters, each of which subverts their archetype: the nerdy guy becomes Johnson, the jock Hart, the outcast girl Gillan and the popular girl Black. As you can imagine, those are all changes that the cast gets to have a lot of fun with. On top of that, each character has in-game abilities. Black, for instance, can read maps that others can’t while Johnson is incredibly strong. It’s possible that they’re invulnerable as well as the footage ended with a gag involving Black’s character getting eaten by a hippo.

The original Jumanji connection occurs when a guide within the game mentions that Johnson’s character reminds him of another little boy who came there a long time ago.

“Alan Parrish?” Johnson asks.

Look for Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle to hit the big screen December 22.

Movie News

Marvel and DC

X