The first full-length trailer for Elvis was released last Thursday after much anticipation. The movie, which will premier early this summer, is writer-director Baz Luhrmann's first feature since The Great Gatsby in 2013, and Elvis itself has been in the works for several years, dogged by COVID-related delays.The trailer shows Austin Butler (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) as Elvis Presley and follows his life in the public eye amid personal and civil tumult. It begins with a boy Elvis in a Black church, moved by gospel music, then cuts to a nervous 20-something-Elvis on stage, when he was first discovered by manager Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks). It speeds on to Elvis's infamously raucous shows and the scandal that was his dancing, brief moments with wife Priscilla Presley (Olivia DeJonge), and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy. It's clear that this is a movie about Elvis Presley, but it also promises to be a movie about American culture.Let's look at everything else we know so far about the upcoming biopic.
Plot: Exploring the Cultural Landscape of Elvis’s Heyday
It seems Elvis will frame the King as a complicated product of his time. Hit musical biopics like Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman have done this kind of cultural analysis to varying degrees of success, but Luhrmann seems methodical. He explained his desire to make this movie in an exclusive Twitter Movies interview:
Someone like Shakespeare would take a very iconic, famous character and try and explore a larger theme. And if you want to explore America in the fifties, the sixties and the seventies, you couldn’t pick a greater, more iconic life than that of Elvis Presley.
​​​​​​Accordingly, the trailer puts Elvis in conversation with Black culture and civil rights issues of the fifties and sixties. It opens with young Elvis discovering gospel music at a Black church, the congregation taking him into their fold. Later, we hear Elvis' voice-over footage of mad crowds and police cars: "Some people wanted to put me in jail, 'cause of the way I was moving" — a way that was notably "Black." Cut to B.B. King (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) looking up at Elvis, almost smiling. "They might put me in jail for walkin' across the street. But you're a famous white boy," he says.
This paradox defined Elvis's career. Was he championing Black art or appropriating it? Is he a champion of inclusivity or a bannerman of inequity? Perhaps the answer is complicated; maybe it's both. The record may not be as clear as pop culture suggests, and Luhrmann appears to be leaning into this ambiguity. We get a glimpse of B.B. King talking with Elvis in the trailer. Luhrmann has shared footage of Little Richard (Alton Mason) and Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Yola) — eminent Black musicians who influenced Elvis and will also make appearances in the movie.
The trailer ends in 1968, a pivotal year: Martin Luther King and Senator Kennedy were shot and killed just two months apart. The news of MLK's assassination breaks at the trailer's 1:50 mark. "Tragedy, but it has nothing to do with us," Colonel Parker responds. "It's got everything to do with us," Elvis retorts.
The implication is that the movie will explore how these events — and the larger inequities they denoted — weighed on Elvis, a commercially successful white artist. "I just gotta be making the most of this thing while I can. This could all be over in a flash," Elvis says toward the end of the trailer. The last shot shows Elvis on stage at the end of his televised 1968 "Comeback Special," performing "If I Can Dream." The song was an ode to the times, written quickly in response to Kennedy's death — and it quotes directly from Martin Luther King. From the looks of the trailer, Elvis won't paint the King as a patent hero or villain but a human grappling with the issues of his time.
Cast: Austin Butler as The King
One of the technical challenges of creating compelling biopics is living up to fans' expectations. Hyper-famous figures with massive fan bases mean a lot of potential viewers for a movie — and a lot of potential critics. Actors portraying beloved characters, whether they're historical figures or superheroes, typically come under a lot of scrutinies. And viewers are analyzing every snippet of Butler's performance.
Ironically, this kind of hyper-fandom is something Elvis himself helped create. Since his death in 1977, Elvis has become a larger-than-life personality, and Butler knows he has some big suede shoes to fill. "There's an incredible amount of pressure and responsibility to do [Elvis] justice," he said in the Twitter Movies interview. "He's sort of become the wallpaper of society."
Butler's focus has been humanizing the King. "To me, it was the curiosity of finding out, who is he as a human? And delve into studying everything I could on him and watching every bit of footage countless times and reading everything I could and talking to as many people as I could." The efforts seem to have paid off if Butler's jaunty moves are any indication.
As with any biopic about a famous musician, the vocals are crucial. Butler has been working for years to match Elvis's vocal power, voice training six days a week since he landed the role back in 2019. Young Elvis's voice, which we hear throughout the trailer, is all Butler. But the older Elvis sound is a unique hybrid. "We made an exciting decision to have the actor playing Elvis sing early Elvis and then the later part of it. It's Elvis's actual voice blended," Luhrmann explained. The effect may be enough to satisfy Elvis diehards.
Expected Release Date & How To Watch
You have to buy tickets to see this show. Elvis will land in theaters on June 24th, and Luhrmann has said it won't be available on any streaming services. Warner Bros. is abandoning the "pandemic" distribution strategy it used for the likes of Dune and King Richard, which were simultaneously released in theaters and on the HBO Max. The studio will release The Batman exclusively in theaters on March 4th, its first major title to debut in theaters alone since 2019. Baz Luhrmann movies are nothing if not theatrical productions, and Moulin Rouge! and The Great Gatsby were notable box office successes. Elvis could be another great performance.