Last April we reported that SyFy Channel had released a very polished, well produced trailer for their new series. Reactions had been mixed, as it looked like Yet Another TV Prequel series. “Hey, Gotham did it and it worked, everybody into the pool!”
Now the trailer has been rereleased. It’s nothing to get too worked up over. It’s the same trailer they pulled on from distribution on April 19th. We also note that the release date has shifted from 2017 to 2018. There’s been a lot of behind the scenes fumbling around going on, it would seem.
It does look polished, and very slick. It follows the events leading up to the destruction of the planet, but a whole generation back. We’re not following the adventures of Jor-El, but his father. Jor-El doesn’t really even come into the picture. This presumably gives SyFy Channel a whole series to explore before the planet the series set on goes kaboom.
Cameron Cuffe and Georgina Campbell play Seg-El and Lyta Zod, respectively. Ian McElhinney (Game of Thrones) will reportedly play Val-El, grandfather to Seg-El (and therefore great-great-grandfather to Superman). He is described as a rogue genius who believes that space exploration is a basic form of self-defense, who has tried, without success, to warn the Kryptonian elite about the arrival of an ancient threat.
Elliot Cowan (Da Vinci’s Demons) is said to play the Chief Magistrate of Kandor, Daron Vez. Wallis Day (The Royals) will play the daughter of Cowan’s Daron Vez, Nyss Vez. Ann Ogbomo (World War Z) has been cast as Primus Alura Zod, mother to Campbell’s Lyta Zod. She is the leader of the Kryptonian military guild. Aaron Pierre (Tennison) is playing a cadet serving under Alura Zod. Rasmus Hardiker (Your Highness) will play Seg-El’s best friend, “a brilliant engineer” who is a “partner in an underground tech-repair business.”
Krypton is set two generations before the onset of Warner Bros.’s Man of Steel, following Superman’s grandfather – played by Cuffe – and Zod’s grandmother – played by Campbell.
What Happens Now?
This was originally supposed to come out this year. We can’t help but wonder: what the heck is going on over there?
Now we wait. The show has been ordered to series by SyFy Channel, after what must have been a very expensive pilot production, and a four month wait while they were either trying to line up their sponsors or just waiting for Comic-Con to announce the thing. Of the two possibilities, “trying to line up sponsors” makes a little more sense. If everything was locked down tight, they’d have had a massive PR campaign running at San Diego Comic-Con this year, and there’s literally nothing at the convention about it. That means they didn’t know it was going to series until it was too late to plan anything for this year. The best they could do was time the re-release of the trailer for the first day of SDCC and hope to catch some of the PR wave that convention generates.
Fan reaction to the trailer has, so far, been somewhat mixed. Yes, the effects are slick and gorgeous, but it’s impossible to tell what kind of storytelling they’ll be doing, and some have been saying that it looks like yet another TV prequel, and that it looks like it’s going to be little more than Game of Thrones in space.
There’s no release date mentioned either in the trailer, or on the IMDB page for the production. That means that it’s so far out that they honestly have no idea when it’s coming out yet. Our guess is that it will release sometime in September of 2018.
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