The Primate trailer introduces a suitably chilling replacement for The Monkey. The upcoming creature feature was directed and co-written by horror maven Johannes Roberts, who previously helmed Resident Evil: Welcome to Racoon City, 47 Meters Down, and the second The Strangers movie, Prey at Night.
Paramount Pictures has now unveiled the official trailer for Primate. They had previously teased the trailer drop on Wednesday by sharing a clip of an eerie 911 call where a distressed person exclaims that “he killed all the others” while the sounds of a rampaging animal emanate from behind her. This clip opens the full trailer, which then digs deeper into the story.
The trailer kicks off by showcasing the main cast, which includes Dexter: New Blood star Johnny Sequoyah and Jessica Alexander of Disney’s live-action remake of The Little Mermaid. As a group of college friends arrive for a vacation in Hawai’i, Lucy (Sequoyah) introduces Ben, the тιтular chimp, who her mother rescued.
The group gets along with Ben at first, communicating with him through a talk board. However, the situation quickly grows more sinister after they discover a mysterious bite mark on Ben. After growing more and more menacing, Ben eventually breaks Lucy’s arm and uses the talk board to say “Lucy bad.”
The rest of the trailer showcases quick clips of the characters trying to survive Ben’s wrath, though the chimp proves to be unsettlingly intelligent and malicious, finding many ways to foil their plans, including using a second pair of keys to unlock a car in which one of them is hiding.
There is also a brief glimpse of Adam, the mysterious character played by Oscar winner Troy Kotsur. Check out the full trailer below:
The trailer also shares that Primate will debut in theaters on January 9. A January release date used to be a death knell for horror movies, as it became widely considered a time when studios dumped lesser movies into domestic theaters, knowing that fewer audiences would be attending screenings in the winter.
However, this has been the case less and less frequently since 2020. Foremost, this is because the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused worldwide theatrical and production shutdowns, shook up the typical release schedule considerably, causing more tentpole movies, perhaps most notably 2022’s Scream, to debut in January.
2022’s Scream grossed $138.9 million against a reported budget of $24 million.
January has also become more of a bastion for high-concept genre hits, including the 2023 killer robot movie M3GAN, which grossed $7181.8 million against a reported $12 million budget. Primate could follow in its footsteps by harnessing its intriguing premise to become a solid success.
