Asteroid City Trailer Released

It’s time to dive into Wes Anderson’s latest cinematic world. On Wednesday, Focus Features released the first trailer for Asteroid City, a new live-action film directed and written by Anderson. The release of the trailer was teased earlier in the week by the official Asteroid City Twitter account, which also revealed its first poster.

Asteroid City features an ensemble cast that includes Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Liev Schreiber, Hope Davis, Stephen Park, Rupert Friend, Maya Hawke, Steve Carell, Matt Dillon, Hong Chau, Willem Dafoe, Margot Robbie, Tony Revolori, Jake Ryan, and Jeff Goldblum.

What is Asteroid City about?

In Asteroid City, in 1955, students and parents from across the country gather for scholarly competition, rest, recreation, comedy, drama, and romance at a Junior Stargazer convention held in a fictional American desert town.

“Working for Wes is not easy,” Cranston explained in a recent interview with Collider. “It’s very detailed and very specific and so you really have to really concentrate hard. What offsets that is the congeniality and the togetherness of the experience. We’re all at this five-star hotel in Spain and every single night is a banquet. Every single night you are exchanging thoughts and laughter and someone brings a guitar, and you’re singing, and you’re talking. It’s just so familial. It’s like fulfilling an actor dream camp. It was a really, really great experience albeit, again, the work was very specific and very difficult.”

“When someone like that calls, it’s the same thing, I did the same thing with Tom Hanks,” Cranston continued. “When he calls for something, it’s like, yes and what am I doing? I say to Wes Anderson, yes, what is it you want me to do? That’s the way it is for all the actors. We kind of show up and say, what is it you want us, how do you want to do this? Wes makes an animatic and voices all the characters in the animatic, what he calls the cartoon. So we watch it on a laptop. We watch the entire movie that he voices on a laptop and it’s like, oh, got it. I see where you’re going. I see what you’re doing and let me see if I can hit that target, the character you’ve already created. Let me see if I can point my arrow toward it and hit it bullseye.”

Asteroid City is co-written by Anderson and Roman Coppola, and produced with his longtime collaborators Steven Rales and Jeremy Dawson.

Are you excited for Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City? Will you be checking out the film’s first trailer? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!

Asteroid City is set to be released in select theaters on June 16th, with a wider opening following on June 23rd.