The Belko Experiment

It might be a tale as old as time, but audiences have proven there’s still a few petals left on that old flower. Despite being projected to open at somewhere between $214–245 million worldwide, Beauty and the Beast knocked the pants off those projections, eclipsing $350 million at the international box office and setting a March record for domestic releases along the way. Let’s take a look at how things shook out this past weekend with some of the expected grosses.

The strict dictionary definition of the word ‘new’ is as follows: “not existing before; made, introduced, or discovered recently or now for the first time.” So in the most literal sense, the trailer for The Belko Experiment that the film’s screenwriter James Gunn posted on his Facebook page last night is indeed new. It includes about fifteen seconds of fresh footage, in which Gunn’s brother Sean (so lovingly referred to as “Marty Espenscheid AKA Kraglin from Guardians AKA Kirk from Gilmore Girls AKA my idiot brother Sean” in the post) sneaks onto the roof of his office building with a couple coworkers for a quick all-natural smoke break. “Did you happen to read what you signed when you started working at this place?” he warns.

Sometimes a movie comes along and gives you something you didn’t even know you wanted. Take The Belko Experiment. I’ve seen movies like Battle Royale and even the fun-in-theory, bad-in-execution Operation: Endgame, but it wasn’t until I first saw the first red band trailer for James Gunn’s upcoming film that I realized exactly what I’d been missing. Those movies delivered on fun fight sequences and gratuitous violence, but they lacked the return of a creeper, sleazy, Ghost-era Tony Goldwyn. Not any more.

Joining The Hunger Games and Battle Royale in the grand tradition of movies about people forced to kill each other in a deranged competition is The Belko Experiment, the new trailer for which surfaced earlier today. Last seen playing to rabid midnight crowds at the Toronto International Film Festival, the brutal horror film will go into public release on March 17 of next year, by which point everyday life in America will vaguely resemble the events depicted in the trailer above.

I’ve always wondered why more horror films aren’t set in corporate environments. While the office remains a popular setting for comedies and the ubiquitous faux-documentary television programs, anything darker  —  such as the 2006 horror film Severance which centers on a group of coworkers in the midst of an office wilderness retreat  —  remains the exception rather than the rule. For how much hidden animosity and frustration your typical office building contains, you’d think this would be an area ripe for exploration by the right twisted storyteller.

First of all, when last we wrote about this project, it was called The Belco Experiment with a ‘c.’ Now it seems to be The Belko Experiment with a ‘k.’ But it’s the same film, from a script by Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn. All that’s changed is one letter in the title. (Maybe there’s a real Belco out there that didn’t want their name showing up in a James Gunn horror movie?)