Paramount caused a stir a few weeks back when the studio announced that they were pulling big budget sci-fi blockbuster Infinite from theaters and sending it to their brand new streaming service instead, while it transpired in the aftermath that they didn’t consult either director Antoine Fuqua or star Mark Wahlberg about the decision, having clearly paid no attention to the Warner Bros. fiasco late last year.
Nonetheless, Infinite has been given a June 10th release date, and with less than two weeks to go, the first trailer has finally arrived. It’s certainly an exciting promo, one that already promises a typically stoic and straight-faced Wahlberg in action hero mode, which is arguably the least exciting of his various screen personas, but luckily it would appear that Chiwetel Ejiofor is in full-on scenery chewing mode as a villain with an implacable accent and a penchant for exposition.
The promo then explodes into life with a barnstorming vehicle chase through a mysterious facility, before a voiceover continues to outline the broad strokes of the high concept plot and bombard our eyeballs with a series of sweeping visuals and standard action epic imagery. All told, it looks like a whole lot of fun, with Fuqua typically a reliable pair of hands when it comes to delivering studio pictures with decent-sized budgets, and Wahlberg is more than familiar with this sort of territory as well.
It’s the first major in-house title for Paramount+ as the nascent platform looks to instantly gain a foothold in the streaming wars, and Infinite certainly possesses the potential to drawn in plenty of new subscribers to the service based on nothing but the track records of Fuqua and Wahlberg, as well as the glossy sci-fi trappings seen in the trailer and its high concept premise.