In the middle of the night, Sony Pictures released the first trailer for Vin Diesel‘s Bloodshot, which will hit theaters on February 21, 2020.

The movie co-stars Guy PearceToby Kebbell, Eiza Gonzalez, Talulah Riley, and is directed by David Wilson, who previously directed “Sonnie’s Edge” in Netflix’s Love, Death + Robots series. Sony’s official tagline for the film is:

Based on the bestselling comic book, Vin Diesel stars as Ray Garrison, a soldier recently killed in action and brought back to life as the superhero Bloodshot by the RST corporation. With an army of nanotechnology in his veins, he’s an unstoppable force –stronger than ever and able to heal instantly. But in controlling his body, the company has sway over his mind and memories, too. Now, Ray doesn’t know what’s real and what’s not – but he’s on a mission to find out.

Bloodshot is the first movie to be made based on any characters from Valiant Entertainment, despite the company being around in one form or another since Jim Shooter created it as Valiant Comics thirty years ago. In 2005, a group bought the rights to the characters from Acclaim Comics to form Valiant Entertainment, which reemerged with a publishing division in 2012 under the aegis of CEO and Chief Creative Officer Dinesh Shamdasani. Shamdasani left the company in 2016 but resurfaced in 2018 as a co-founder of Hivemind.

Bloodshot was originally created in 1992 by Kevin VanHookDon Perlin and Bob Layton and has appeared in different formats (and under various aliases) under Valiant and then Acclaim. The trailer makes the movie look very different from what some might expect from the comics, which is often a violent and bloody shoot-em-up comic. The trailer plays with the ideas of memory and what Diesel’s Ray Garrison remembers when he’s revived by the RST Corporation. In other words, Cats won’t be the only movie coming out in the next few months that will be all about “Memories.”

The Beat actually had a chance to speak with Shamdasani, director David Wilson and Hivemind VP of Brand & Content Strategy Hunter Gorinson at New York Comic-Con a few weeks back, and the more cerebral nature of the trailer and movie is intentional.

In fact, it’s part of what attracted Diesel to the movie in the first place, as Wilson told us:

“Vin plays strong, confident Alpha males. They’re one step ahead of everyone else all the time. In this film, there’s a big manipulative quality, and he’s catching up with everyone else, and I think he was excited to play something that was a little off-type for him, at least for part of the film.”

Earlier in our interview, Wilson had mentioned Memento as a reference point, and as you’ll notice, the star of Christopher Nolan‘s early film co-stars in Bloodshot as well. “I had spoken to [Guy Pearce] about it, because I’m sure when he read the script, he was going to say, ‘You stole that scene from our movie,'” Wilson quipped. “It’s interesting, because without giving it away, he’s on the other side of the story that he was in Memento, which was fascinating, I think, for him.”

Although there is no rating mentioned with the trailer, The Beat actually broke the story exclusively a few weeks back that Bloodshot will be PG-13 and that the trailer will be in front of Terminator: Dark Fate on November 1. (It probably isn’t irony that Terminator: Dark Fate is directed by Wilson’s Blur Studios co-founder Tim Miller, and it premiered last night as a surprise at a number of Terminator 2 Alamo Drafthouse fan events across the country last night. The Beat will have its review of the new Terminator on Tuesday night.)

You can check out the first trailer for Bloodshot below. Please let us know what you think, and look for our full interview with Shamdasani, Wilson and Gorinson later this week.

Bloodshot
Sony Pictures