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Leaked trailers: Deadpool, Suicide Squad, and X-Men: Apocalypse

Alex Abad-Santos is a senior correspondent who explains what society obsesses over, from Marvel and movies to fitness and skin care. He came to Vox in 2014. Prior to that, he worked at the Atlantic.

  1. The trailers/sizzle reels for three of the most highly talked-about movies at San Diego Comic-Con — Warner Bros.' Suicide Squad and Fox's X-Men: Apocalypse and Deadpool — have leaked.
  2. The leaks originated from what appear to be cellphone footage from SDCC's Hall H, and they're shot from different areas of the auditorium.
  3. This isn't unlike what happened with Marvel's Avengers: Age of Ultron trailer and Warner Bros.' Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice trailer, which were also leaked ahead of schedule.
  4. In both the Suicide Squad and X-Men: Apocalypse trailers, there's a lack of special effects, signaling that there's still a lot of fine-tuning and work to be done with both films.
  5. Warner Bros. released an official version of the Suicide Squad trailer (below) on Monday
  6. Fox's leaks have been taken down

What happens in the Suicide Squad trailer

There are three big takeaways from the Suicide Squad trailer: Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) is set as the main protagonist; Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) expounds on the premise of the group; and the Joker (Jared Leto) is seen presumably torturing someone.

"Getting people to act against their own self-interest is what I do for a living," Waller says, explaining that the Suicide Squad will be a ragtag group of villains who carry out complicated and covert operations that bend the rules of justice. If something goes wrong, this Suicide Squad will be blamed.

Robbie's Harley Quinn draws the most focus after being introduced to us in a beautiful, dreamy, slightly psychotic shot where Quinn is in a cell performing acrobatics and suspended in the air by what looks like shredded rags.

"Are you the devil?" Quinn asks Waller.

"All you need to know is you work for me," she responds.

We see various scenes of the team being assembled, fighting, and posing, and then Leto's Joker arrives in all his pale, tattooed glory.

"I'm just gonna hurt you — really, really, bad," he says, as the trailer fades to black.

Update: Warner Bros. has released the official footage

What happens in the X-Men: Apocalypse trailer

In this look at X-Men: Apocalypse, we see the return of Moira MacTaggert (Rose Byrne), who is explaining that mutants in olden days were seen as gods. Of course, she's talking about Apocalypse (Oscar Isaacs), who we find out has the power to control other mutants.

The trailer provides glimpses of all of the new mutants, including Jean Grey (Sophie Turner), Storm (Alexandra Shipp), and Psylocke (Olivia Munn) as well as franchise stalwarts Magneto (Michael Fassbender), Charles Xavier (James McAvoy), and Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence).

Because Apocalypse can control mutants, the trailer becomes a guessing game of which side we think the mutants belong to. And the bad news for the good guys is that Magneto and Storm look to be on Apocalypse's side.

What happens in the Deadpool trailer

"You're a fighter. We can give you abilities most men only dream of — make you a superhero," the voiceover to the Deadpool trailer (above) begins.

The highlight of the Deadpool trailer is that it sets up its irreverent, humorous antihero Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) against the high drama of a superhero movie. We see that Deadpool is experimented on, but we also see him cracking jokes the entire time.

It's funny, there are f-bombs, there's Salt-N-Pepa, and there's a real attempt to really make a superhero movie that doesn't feel like a superhero movie. There are also more special effects — a lot of which look like test footage — in this trailer than there are in the other two.

Update: Fox's two leaked trailer were taken down on Tuesday.


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