An official trailer for The Current War is here. Benedict Cumberbatch stars in the film as Thomas Edison, the famed inventor who's ready to (quite literally) light up Manhattan using his DC technology. However, before he can, he's challenged by George Westinghouse (Michael Shannon), a businessman who believes that he and his partner, Nikolai Tesla (Nicholas Hoult), have found the true way of the future for bringing electricity to America - namely, with Tesla's AC current. As a result, the three men go to war and wind up starting an even bigger corporate battle along the way.
The Current War was one of several completed films that found itself without a home after its original distributor, The Weinstein Company, closed up shop in the wake of co-founder Harvey Weinstein's sexual abuse scandal in fall 2017. It took a while but, back in May, the movie was finally picked up by the newly-established 101 Studios and set to hit theaters this October, instead. Now, with fall still a ways off, the studio has officially gotten its marketing campaign for the period drama underway.
101 Studios has now released its trailer for The Current War online, ahead of its arrival on the big screen. You can check it out in the space below. Written by Michael Mitnick (The Giver) and directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon (Me and Earl and the Dying Girl), The Current War actually premiered at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival (ahead of the Weinstein scandal) and earned mixed to negative reviews from the critics there. However, in the nearly two years since then, Gomez-Rejon has made some substantial changes to the movie's theatrical cut. In an interview with EW in coordination with the new trailer's release, the filmmaker confirmed that he'd added a handful of new scenes, cut the overall runtime, and even incorporated a brand-new score into The Current War. As he explained to the outlet, the cut that screened at TIFF two years ago was "a work in progress that wasn't fully realized, and far from what I intended the film to be". He went on to assert that The Current War's latest cut is the "best version" of the movie, and what he wanted to make in the first place.
Based on the trailer, The Current War seems like a fairly conventional awards season-friendly historical drama - albeit, one brought to life by a great cast that also includes Tom Holland (in a role he shot nearly two and a half years ago), as well as Alien: Covenant's Katherine Waterston and Sense8 star Tuppence Middleton. The cinematography by Stoker and IT's Chung-Soon Chung looks pretty stylish too, which should help to liven up the biopic-y proceedings here. The Current War doesn't really feel like a must-see for the time being, but that could change once people start to get a look at this revised cut that Gomez-Rejon's assembled.
