It’s tough to say just how much public interest there was in a movie exploring the early days of 101 Dalmatians’s would-be dog-murdering fashion icon Cruella de Vil. But it’s easy enough to see how, with two live-action Maleficent movies under its belt, Disney figured it could keep the villain origin machine chugging.
Cruella’s freshly-dropped first trailer introduces us to Emma Stone in action as the the movie’s titular lunatic who muses about how everyone’s quite right to have their concerns about her mental state. The Cruella is this film’s well in adulthood, and makes no point whatsoever of trying to make herself out to be anything other than mad, bad, and dangerous to know—with a flair for the dramatic and a proclivity for talking to herself.
What’s particularly promising about the movie, judging just from the trailer, is how Cruella seems like it might veer away from the Maleficent movies focus on recontextualizing its characters and making you understand how caring, benevolent people can be transformed into monsters. Cruella, it seems, will be more of a Batman villain, someone who first cut their teeth on the hard, mean streets of an uncaring city before making the decision to dress for the job they want. The job in this case being the maiming and murdering of animals as sacrifices to the eldritch gods of couture, of course.
Some people, like Cruella, just want to see the world burn—and audiences will be able to watch her make a go at doing just that when Cruella, which also stars Emma Thompson, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, Joel Fry, and Mark Strong, hits theaters on May 28.
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