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The Hunt: Delayed thriller tracks down new trailer and March release

By Josh Weiss
Betty Gilpin The Hunt

Last year, Universal decided to shelve The Hunt — an action-thriller about members of the elite class hunting ordinary people for sport — after the tragic mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton.

Now the Blumhouse-produced movie has finally set a release date: The Hunt will arrive in theaters on March 13, and today it dropped a new trailer that leans into the headline-dominating controversy. "The most talked about movie of the year, is one nobody's seen yet," teases this new sneak peek.

“This is not a dangerous movie,” the film's co-writer Damon Lindelof (HBO's Watchmen) told Variety. “This is not a provocative movie. This is not a divisive movie. I think the big shift between now and then is that more people have seen it and they’ve responded positively."

Take a look below:

Helmed by Craig Zobel (The Leftovers, Westworld), the film stars Betty Gilpin (GLOW) as Crystal, one of the 12 people being hunted by the wealthy predators. After realizing she's being tracked like some sort of wild animal, Crystal decides to fight back and take as many of them down with her as she can. As we said when the first trailer was released last year, The Hunt is like a mixture of The PurgeHostel, Predators, and 1932's The Most Dangerous Game.

"We felt like everybody got it wrong because no one had seen the movie," producer Jason Blum also said to Variety. "Both of us were very eager for people to see the movie and realize that the movie is 100 percent satire and pokes fun at both sides equally."

"This movie does not celebrate violence. It does not celebrate stereotyping or finger-wagging or making assumptions about, in air quotes, the other side. It excoriates that behavior and, more importantly, it has fun in the process," continued Lindelof, who co-wrote the project's screenplay with Nick Cuse (Netflix's Maniac).

Even the teaser poster gets in on the fun, cheekily crossing out the original September 2019 release date, which sits right next to the new one.

The Hunt teaser poster

Hilary Swank, Emma Roberts, Glenn Howerton, Ike Barinholtz, Amy Madigan, Ethan Suplee, Macon Blair, J.C. MacKenzie, Usman Ally, Wayne Duvall, Reed Birney, and Teri Wyble co-star.