Director Antoine Fuqua and Chris Pratt unveiled the first footage from this fall’s reboot of “The Magnificent Seven” at the Sony presentation at CinemaCon.
“I’ve seen the movie and it’s f–king awesome,” Pratt told exhibitors at the Las Vegas convention. The star and Fuqua also joked with Sony worldwide distribution president Rory Bruer, about beating up the studio to make the movie that the filmmaker wanted.
“He was out there every day fighting Sony. Fighting against you,” the actor said as he towered over Bruer to his right on stage, “whooping your ass. He was fighting Sony to make his movie great.”
Pratt also noted that the filmmakers had an equally contentious battled with Mother Nature during the course of the shoot. “Never shoot a Western in Louisiana in the spring,” Pratt joked.
Pratt, who had also appeared earlier at the Sony presentation to promote the Jennifer Lawrence sci-fi romance “Passengers,” explained that he had a special attachment to the project.
“I’ve always wanted to do a Western,” he said, noting that he watched many such movies with his dad but was slow to recognize their appeal. “I didn’t like them then and now I get it, like country music.”
The two then introduced the first public footage of the film, which follows a mysterious man played by Washington hired by a frontier woman (Haley Bennett) wronged by an evil fellow played by Peter Sarsgaard.
“Decent people are being driven from our homes,” Bennett says. “I seek righteousness but I’ll take revenge.”
Washington proceeds to round up a motley crew of people to challenge Sarsgaard’s Bartholomew Bogue and his army, starting with a gambler with a fondness for explosives played with laid-back charm by Pratt.
The others in their seven-fold party include a bounty hunter, sharpshooter, a Mexican outlaw, a trapper, a Comanche warrior and an assassin.
The cast includes Ethan Hawke, Vincent D’Onofrio, Byung-hun Lee and Matt Bomer.
“The Magnificent Seven” opens in theaters on Sept. 23.
For the record: A previous version of this story incorrectly identified the Sony executive on stage with Pratt and Fuqua.