Create a free profile to get unlimited access to exclusive videos, sweepstakes, and more!
Asteroid City: How Many Movie Stars Can You Spot in Poster for Wes Anderson's '50s Sci-Fi Throwback?
Eat your heart out, Waldo!
The 2023 summer movie season boasts some of the most impressive ensemble pieces in recent memory.
Fast X, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Oppenheimer, Barbie, Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem are chock full of A-list movie stars (Fast X alone contains a total of four Oscar winners). But only one film among the pack delivers the hand-crafted quirk and charm of writer/director/producer Wes Anderson.
RELATED: Wes Anderson’s ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’ remains an animated stop-motion joy
That'd be Asteroid City (opening in theaters everywhere next month after a brief limited release), a retro-inspired throwback to America's rabid fascination with cosmic exploration during those heated Space Race years of the 1950s. Like the titles mentioned above, Asteroid City is jam-packed with onscreen talent — from Tom Hanks to Tilda Swinton. And now, you can feast your eyes on the full cast with the official poster, released today by Focus Features. It's basically a Where's Waldo? collage of Hollywood icons.
Interestingly, three of the actors — Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, and Adrien Brody appear in black and white — which seems to imply that they'll be appearing via flashbacks, television screens, newsreels, or similar.
Check it out for yourself below:
Set against the backdrop of a fictional desert town (circa 1955), the plot is classic Wes Anderson with a healthy dash of Spielbergian sci-fi wonder: "The itinerary of a Junior Stargazer/Space Cadet convention (organized to bring together students and parents from across the country for fellowship and scholarly competition) is spectacularly disrupted by world-changing events."
Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Liev Schreiber, Hope Davis, Stephen Park, Rupert Friend, Maya Hawke, Steve Carell, Matt Dillon, Hong Chau, Willem Dafoe, Margot Robbie, Tony Revolori, Jake Ryan, and Jeff Goldblum comprise the full ensemble.
Speaking with Collider last fall, Cranston detailed the sheer meticulousness of Anderson's creative process:
"Wes makes an animatic and voices all the characters in the animatic, what he calls the cartoon. So we watch it on a laptop. We watch the entire movie that he voices on a laptop and it's like, oh, got it. I see where you're going. I see what you're doing and let me see if I can hit that target, the character you've already created. Let me see if I can point my arrow toward it and hit it bullseye."
Anderson wrote the screenplay based on a story he co-conceived alongside Roman Coppola (co-writer on The Darjeeling Limited and Moonrise Kingdom). He also produced the film with Steven Rales (The French Dispatch) and Jeremy Dawson (The Whale).
Asteroid City will enjoy a limited release on June 16 in New York and Los Angeles before a nationwide rollout June 23.
