Drew Goddard's 'Bad Times at the El Royale' First Look Photos Are Quite Good
Drew Goddard calls Bad Times at the El Royale a “love letter to ’60s film noir and crime fiction" and we are totally here for it.
When you’ve had a successful career writing for J.J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof, and Josh Whedon AND your directorial feature happens to be 2012’s splatter fest The Cabin in the Woods - you better damn well bet our ears are going to perk up when photos of Drew Goddard’s latest thriller hit the web!
Goddard's 1969-set Bad Times at the El Royale follows a group of seven strangers, each with a secret to bury, who meet at Lake Tahoe's dark and mysterious El Royale hotel. But over the course of the night, each of the strangers are offered a shot at redemption - that is of course - before everything goes to hell!
The first photos released courtesy of EMPIRE and EW features five of El Royale's seven guests including Chris Hemsworth (shirtless of course) as a charismatic cult leader, Jon Hamm as a vacuum cleaner salesperson (because every American had carpet in 1969), Jeff Bridges as a down-on-his-luck priest, Cynthia Erivo as a singer, and an impressionable southern girl's older sister played by Dakota Johnson.
Lewis Pullman (Lean on Pete) and Cailee Spaeny (Pacific Rim: Uprising) round out the mysterious seven along with Russell Crowe and Nick Offerman cast in undisclosed roles!
If Bad Times sorta sounds like the spiritual sequel to The Cabin in the Woods, Goddard says not to think too much of it telling EW:
❝The Cabin in the Woods was very much about the genre itself; [El Royale] certainly is not. It’s more of a straightforward narrative. What they have in common is a shared sense of danger, and the boldness in choice that Cabin has. We certainly don’t play it safe.❞
I'll say this - it looks as if Goddard plucked Hemsworth from the depths of Cabin in the Woods purgatory and sent him back to 1969 for one night in hell at the El Royale. For now, we can agree to disagree about such rubbish theories.
Bad Times at the El Royale is due in theaters October 5, 2018.
