Skip to main content

Netflix teaser for ‘War Machine” features Brad Pitt as a high-ranking general


Netflix grabbed our attention in 2015 when it paid $30 million for the rights to the upcoming Brad Pitt film War Machine, and we’re finally getting closer to seeing if the investment was a good one. The film is due out this spring, and the streamer released the first teaser Wednesday.

Billed as “an absurdist war story for our times,” the film is inspired by journalist Michael Hastings’ 2012 nonfiction book The Operators. Written and directed by David Michod, the movie fictionalizes real-life events, resulting in sharp satire. The teaser hints at this, with Pitt’s four-star general character at one point casually saying, “No, finish your phone call. The war can wait.”

Recommended Videos

Pitt plays Dan McMahon, a confident and charismatic general who leads NATO troops in Afghanistan until a journalist’s exposé leads to his dramatic fall from grace. His character is based on Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who faced backlash after Hastings reported that he and his staff had mocked government officials, including Vice President Joe Biden. The general ended up resigning from his post and retiring from the Army not long thereafter.

The cast also includes Tilda Swinton, Sir Ben Kingsley, Anthony Michael Hall, Topher Grace, Will Poulter, Lakeith Stanfield, Emory Cohen, John Magaro, R.J. Cyler, Alan Ruck, Scoot McNairy, and Meg Tilly. The lineup certainly looks bankable, but we’ll have to wait for the movie to start streaming before we know for sure.

At the time of the deal, War Machine was Netflix’s most high-profile acquisition. The streamer has since paid even more for other projects, including the forthcoming Will Smith film Bright, which cost a whopping $90 million. In comparison, War Machine may be a bargain.

The film premieres on Netflix on May 26.

Stephanie Topacio Long
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Stephanie Topacio Long is a writer and editor whose writing interests range from business to books. She also contributes to…
All Quiet on the Western Front trailer exposes the horror of war
A harrowing moment in All Quiet on the Western Front.

The first adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's classic novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, arrived in cinemas in 1930. It has been adapted to many different mediums in the 92 years since that film's release. Later this year, Netflix is offering up a new adaptation that gives All Quiet on the Western Front a modern flair that will play well come Oscar time. But if you're expecting this film to glorify war, then you've come to the wrong place. This isn't a movie about personal glory or the righteousness of patriotic fervor. This is a horror story, and war is Hell.

All Quiet on the Western Front | Official Trailer | Netflix

Read more
The Addams Family sends Wednesday to Nevermore in Netflix’s new teaser
Jenna Ortega in Wednesday.

It's been 23 years since The Addams Family had their own live-action TV show. However, Netflix is putting the spotlight on a single member of the family in its upcoming series, Wednesday. Yes, it's true: America's favorite Goth girl is going solo. But if the first teaser trailer for Wednesday is any indication, Wednesday Addams hasn't lost her edge. Just ask the local high school swimming team who dared to harass her brother. Wednesday's response to their cruelty involves trapping the swimmers in a pool with hungry piranhas.

Wednesday Addams | Official Teaser | Netflix

Read more
Bullet Train review: Brad Pitt shines in a jokey, stylish action film
Brad Pitt looks concerned on the bullet train.

Filmmakers have been ripping off the motormouthed, jukebox-boogie style of Quentin Tarantino for so long now that the ripoffs have spawned their own ripoffs, which in turn have spawned their own ripoffs, and so on into oblivion. The latest branch of this incestual family tree of archly violent hitman comedies is Bullet Train, a hyperactive, supersized barrage of jocular kill-or-be-killed mayhem. As directed by David Leitch, folding a bunch of sixth-hand Tarantino-isms into his own identifiable John Wick schtick, the film plays like the great great great grandson of Pulp Fiction. This means that it’s also related to multiple generations of bastard offspring, straight back from Free Fire to Seven Psychopaths to Smoking Aces to some of the earliest and most idiosyncratic of the pretenders, the lads-and-cads underworld picaresques of Guy Ritchie.

Bullet Train takes all the stereotypical hallmarks of the QT school of crime caper — the ironic pop needle drops, the digressive pop-culture blather, the “I shot Marvin in the face” punchline ultra-violence—and blows them out into a neon, candy-coated Saturday morning cartoon of flippant carnage. True to its title, the film unfolds almost entirely aboard a single locomotive, racing from Tokyo to Kyoto on the Shinkansen railway. That moving backdrop is reflected in the super-sonic speed of the banter and gunplay, but not in the nonlinear path of the narrative, which keeps breaking off into flashback detours of pertinent backstory splatter, including a literal body count tallied in a fourth-wall-breaking montage and the belated payoff of a background news story that makes a slithering, unconventional deposit into Chekhov’s armory.

Read more