'Elvis' Movie Trailer With Austin Butler, Tom Hanks Has Social Media in Full Shake, Rattle and Roll Mode

By Daniel S. Levine

Warner Bros. finally released the first trailer for Elvis, Baz Luhrmann's highly-anticipated, big-budget biopic about Elvis Presley, on Thursday. The trailer had Elvis fans on social media buzzing with anticipation, especially since the movie has been in the works for years. The film stars Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood breakout Austin Butler as the King of Rock and Roll, opposite Tom Hanks as Col. Tom Parker.

As the trailer shows, Elvis promises to be a splashy dramatization of Presley's career beginnings, up until the years before his death in 1977. The "Jailhouse Rock" singer's relationship with Parker is also central to the story. Parker discovered Presley in 1955 and was his manager until Presley's death. Olivia DeJonge also stars as Priscilla Presley, while Yola Quarterly plays the influential singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Luke Bracey, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Dace Montgomery, Helen Tompson, Richard Roxburgh, and David Whenham also star in the movie.

Elvis was written by Luhrmann with Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce, Jeremy Doner. It was originally scheduled to hit theaters in October 2021, before the coronavirus pandemic forced production delays. It is now scheduled to hit theaters on June 24, 2022, and, like most Warner Bros. releases lately, it will stream on HBO Max during the first 45 days after its theatrical release.

'I am really intrigued'

Ahead of the trailer's release, Butler described the intensive process for training his voice to sound like Presley's for the movie. "I think when I began the process of this, I set out to get my voice to sound identical to his," Butler explained. "My goal is, if you heard a recording of me and you heard a recording of him, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference and that, I held that for a long time."

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'This has my full attention'

Luhrmann, whose other credits include The Great Gatsby and Moulin Rouge!, said his goal for the film was "getting inside the soul of a human being." He and Butler constructed an "unusual language, a musical language" to blend Butler's voice with Presley's.

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'Straight up chills'

Although the film was made in Luhrmann's native Australia, the director said he did take a trip to the U.S. for his research. "I had the privilege of, as the ultimate outsider, to be allowed into the world of Elvis. Eighteen months, I had a space on standby in the barn at Graceland, and to be in Nashville, Austin and I, in Elvis's actual recording studio with some of the greatest musicians in the world," he said. "A thing that became very clear was that as you got deep and deep and deep and deep into the research, the records that were Sun Records, the early recordings ... it's somewhat nostalgic."

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'This looks freakin' spectacular'

Scroll on to see how fans responded to the trailer on Twitter.

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'Take my money!'

"What an undertaking, portraying the biggest music star of all time," one fan wrote. "Really looking forward to this but need to remember that no actor can compare with the great man. Interested to see Tom Hanks as Colonel Tom Parker, the man responsible for making and ultimately breaking Elvis."

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'Words cannot express how excited I am for this'

"Words cannot express how excited I am for this," one fan wrote.

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