The BBC and HBO brought a new trailer to San Diego Comic-Con Thursday for the new series His Dark Materials. Logan star Dafne Keen is back in a leading role as Lyra Belacqua, with Ruth Wilson as the vile Mrs. Coulter, James McAvoy as the grand Lord Asriel, and Lin-Manuel Miranda as the friend to polar bears everywhere, Lee Scoresby.
If it all looks familiar it’s because the first part of the series traces the steps of the Philip Pullman novel Northern Lights aka The Golden Compass, already translated into the movie The Golden Compass, a big-budget, special effects filled spectacle in 2007 starring Dakota Blue Richards, Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, Eva Green, Sam Elliott, and Christopher Lee, and an equally impressive voice cast. The film was as big as fantasy movies get, with a budget to support an all-star cast, so it will be a challenge to create an episodic version as spellbinding and audience-grabbing on a TV studio budget.
Yet for television fantasy it looks great so far–Dafne Keen showed in Logan she can create one of the greatest superheroine performances of all time even at her young age, and for fans of the original film and the novels the trailer may just get them to finally check out an HBO subscription. Last week novelist Philip Pullman commented on Twitter: “Today I wore a jacket I hadn’t worn for two years. In the pocket I found my green leather pen case containing the pen that wrote His Dark Materials… I knew it would come back to me.” Coincidence? We doubt it.
Complete with a new alethiometer, check out this great trailer for the BBC-produced HBO series, His Dark Materials:
His Dark Materials arrives on HBO this fall.
C.J. Bunce
Editor
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