Though Jordan Peele’s upcoming project with Universal’s been shrouded in mystery, the director’s track record of making imaginative, ambitious horror movies has given many people more than enough reason to get excited. From the looks of the movie’s new poster and the subtext of its title, that excitement might end up being justified.
Apropos of it being Thursday, Peele took to his Twitter account to share the first poster for Nope, a new film set to star Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out, Black Panther), Keke Palmer (Scream Queens, Scream), and Steven Yeun (The Walking Dead, Invincible). While the poster is simple and its visuals clearly don’t tell Nope’s whole story, an ominous storm cloud (perhaps from space, given the starry night sky) terrorising a city of people seems very much like the strange sort of premise Peele could build a story around — and manage to scare the crap out of people with.
Ominous as Nope’s poster is, the movie’s title similarly sets a foreboding tone, both because of its simplicity, and its implication that “nope” is a word that may come to mind for some of its characters as they encounter a weird-looking cloud that seems to have taken hold of a flag garland.
In both of Peele’s previous films, when people have been confronted with strange, dangerous, and seemingly supernatural things, there’s always been someone around to express the anxieties the audience feels as they watch it all play out.
“Nope” can mean a lot of things, but given the way the movie’s being framed, it’s almost certainly going to be an idea on its characters’ minds when the movie hits theatres July 22, 2022. (Horror fans, however, just might find themselves saying “Hell yeah!”)