Babylon Movie First Look Released

Babylon, a star-studded tribute to the golden age of Hollywood, is coming to theaters in December, and Vanity Fair has a first look at a number of stills from the film, including looks at the characters played by Margot Robbie, Brad Pitt, and Diego Calva. The movie also stars Watchmen's Jean Smart, Spider-Man: No Way Home's Tobey Maguire, and a number of other big names, all paying homage to the 1920s with a group of interconnected (and mostly fictional) characters from behind-the-scenes of the earliest days of Hollywood filmmaking.

The movie hails from director Damien Chazelle, who started turning the concept over in his head about 15 years ago, but who wasn't confident he could pull off the huge spectacle of the film until after he had success with movies like La La Land and First Man. 

"It was really a wild West period for these people, this gallery of characters, as they rise and fall, rise, fall, rise again, fall again," Chazelle told the magazine. "The thing that they're building is springing back on them and chewing them up."  

You can see some of the images below, and there are more at the Vanity Fair article here.

Not much is known about the story's plot, although a short trailer did debut at CinemaCon. Per Vanity Fair, the movie "features a cast of (mostly fictional) characters whose dreams of fame and success rest on navigating a perilous town." It has the visual extravagance of something like La La Land, which in itself felt like it owed a debt to Baz Luhrmann, whose hyper-stylized and meticulously-designed films like Moulin Rouge and Elvis tend to focus less on story and more on tone and style.

It's a risky movie -- it has been six years since La La Land, and these highly stylized pieces, especially with potentially insular showbiz themes, can fall flat with the mainstream audience. But Paramount is still expecting big things from the film, making it one of their widest releases in a year that also had Top Gun: Maverick.

Babylon is scheduled for limited release on December 25, 2022, followed by a wide release on January 6, 2023.