Jordan Peele’s “Nope” Trailer Wows During Super Bowl

February 14, 2022

It’s safe to say the first trailer for Jordan Peele’s Nope is as deliciously potent a peek at a new movie as we’ve seen in a long, long time. This first look at Peele’s eagerly-anticipated third feature film was revealed during Sunday’s Super Bowl matchup between the Cincinnati Bengals and Los Angeles Rams, and it contained nearly as much excitement in two minutes as the game did in three hours. And it was a good game! Here’s what we learned.

The trailer opens at Haywood Ranch, home to the only Black-owned horse trainers in Hollywood. In fact, the trailer opens with a great bit of movie trivia—did you know that the very first assembly of photographs to create a moving picture was of a Black man on a horse? This is the question posed to a room full of studio executives by the great, great, great, great-granddaughter of that man on the horse. She’s the one now selling them on using the Haywood Ranch for their next film. “Ever since the moment pictures could move,” the sales pitch to studio executives goes, “we’ve had skin in the game.”

It’s a cleverly written set-up and gives way to where Peele wants our attention to be, outside the ranch and in the sky, where a very strange cloud is moving towards Daniel Kaluuya’s character, who is a part of the Haywood Ranch family, it appears. So what, exactly, is Peele up to? The menace hovering in the sky certainly screams alien, and the fear on Kaluuya’s face tells us he doesn’t think he’s dealing with anything remotely normal, or even earthly. The trailer doesn’t make it official exactly what will be haunting our characters, but the few reaction shots we get tell us this situation is going to be just as crazy as what Peele pulled off in Get Out and Us. Peele is not only re-teaming with his Get Out star and Oscar-winner Daniel Kaluuya, but he also recruited Kaluuya’s fellow Oscar-nominee from last year, Steven Yeun, and rising star Keke Palmer. It’s Palmer’s character we see later on in the trailer getting sucked up into the sky.

So can we confirm that Nope is definitely an alien abduction movie? Well, no, not yet. We predicted that the film had to do with aliens way back when Peele first revealed the poster, which shows an oddly shaped cloud that looks a little too perfectly symmetrical to be natural. The official trailer seems to confirm that Peele is, in fact, turning his attention to the sci-fi/alien genre, but we’ll still need confirmation. There is no official synopsis we’ve seen that says as much.

Peele has brought along a heavyweight team of actors and crew to create something special for this third film. One of those folks is his DP Hoyte van Hoytema, Christopher Nolan’s longtime collaborator. Needless to say, Nope is one of the most exciting films on this year’s slate.

Nope creeps into theaters on July 22. Check out the trailer below.