Giant monsters compete in professional wrestling in the trailer and poster for Paramount Animation’s upcoming film, Rumble. Directed by Hamish Grieve (making his feature debut), the movie follows Winnie (Blockers’ Geraldine Viswanathan), a young woman who wants to follow in her father’s footsteps and become a wrestling trainer in a world where giant monsters are professional athletes who compete in global wrestling. Will Arnett costars as Steve, a giant and inexperienced monster who Winnie decides to try and train into a champion fighter. Terry Crews also lends his voice to the movie as Tentacularis, a shark-like tentacled creature and the reigning champ of monster wrestling.
Paramount released the official Rumble trailer online this morning, along with a teaser poster and a first-look image of Steve (see the still above). It it seems familiar, that’s probably because the trailer’s been playing with Paramount’s Sonic the Hedgehog since it premiered in theaters earlier this month. Take a look, below.
The trailer makes Rumble look more like the type of computer-animated movies DreamWorks was making in the 2000s than the films the studio and its main competitors (namely, Disney and Pixar) have released in recent years. That’s to say, its animation quality is lower, the plot and themes seem pretty simple, and the pop culture humor (see: the Dirty Dancing joke at the end) comes across as a blatant effort to appeal to parents who take their kids to see Rumble in theaters. Of course that was also the case with Paramount’s animated sequel Sherlock Gnomes, so it’s more or less on brand for the studio right now. There doesn’t appear to be anything all that problematic about Rumble either, even if it does amount to throwaway family fare. And who knows, it might even prove to have a deeper message at it core, much like Paramount’s last animated feature, Wonder Park.
Rumble’s synopsis reads: In a world where monster wrestling is a global sport and monsters are superstar athletes, teenage Winnie seeks to follow in her father’s footsteps by coaching a lovable underdog monster into a champion. Viswanathan, Arnett, and Crews are joined in the cast by Joe “Roman Reigns” Anoa’i, Tony Danza, Becky Lynch, Susan Kelechi Watson, Stephen A. Smith, Jimmy Tatro, Michael Buffer, and Sonic himself, Ben Schwartz. The film is scheduled to open in U.S. theaters early next year on January 29, 2021.
Source: Paramount Pictures
