On Friday, Marvel Studios and Hulu dropped the first full-length trailer for their upcoming adaptation of Runaways. If you haven't watched it yet, it looks pretty incredible.
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One thing that stands out from the trailer is just how much the series looks like the comic. It's definitely not a shot-for-shot remake, treating the comic almost as storyboards in the way of, say, Zack Snyder's Watchmen, but anyone who has read the first arc of Runaways will find the story here extremely familiar.
The trailer opens with a Alex Wilder (played in the series by Rhenzy Feliz) being lectured at by his dad (Ryan Sands) about how why it's important to stay connected with friends and family. The sequence echoes the opening scene of the comic, where Alex's parents tell him to stop playing his superhero-themed MMORPG and get ready to go, but with subtle differences.
While the scenes play out similarly, Alex's dad comes off far more sympathetically in the trailer than the source material. "The kids who know you when you're young—no one will ever know you like that again," the elder Wilder says, trying to convince Alex to come along. In the comic, on the other hand, Alex's dad is confrontational from the start. He demands to know what Alex is wasting the family's money on, and insists that Alex cancel his game subscription even after he points out it was a birthday present. Instead, it was Alex's mother who tried to smooth things over with talk of friends-as-family.
The theme of "the same, but subtly different" continues throughout the trailer. Alex greets the other teenagers at the door, rather than coming downstairs to find them already there; he uncovers a secret passageway to the Pride's layer, rather than already knowing about the catacombs within his own home; Nico Minoru (Lyrica Okano) seems to find the Staff of One in her home, rather than acquiring it during a fight with her mother (Brittany Ishibashi); Gert Yorkes (Ariela Barer) is seemingly pounced on by the velociraptor Old Lace, rather than initially standing on the sidelines. This isn't quite the Runaways we know -- the minor differences abound -- but it has managed to maintain the look and feel of the Brian K. Vaughn/Adrian Alphona comic series.
It's astonishing how much these characters look like their comics counterparts. Alex has a nearly identical look, with only his t-shirts updated for a contemporary look. Molly's (Allegra Acosta) hat looks like it was pulled right out of the comics. Nico's look is perhaps not quite as goth Lolita, but she remains immediately recognizable, as do Gert and Karolina (Virginia Gardner). The only Runaway who looks significantly different from his comics counterpart is Chase Stein (Gregg Sulkin), who appears far less the doofus SoCal teen and more Freeform teen heartthrob.
Particularly impressive, though, is the glimpse we get of Karolina's alien form. It's only a moment, but the shot of Karolina's hands and arms lighting up in blue and pink pastels looks like it was pulled straight from the comics. It's an effect that would have been hard to make work on a TV budget even just a couple of years ago, so it's kind of amazing that Marvel and Hulu decided to stick with that look and were able to pull it off.
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On the other hand, it's not clear yet how closely the Runaways' parents will follow their comic inspirations. We only get brief glimpses of the parentals, with the exception of Geoffrey Wilder, though his apparent softening in the introductory scene suggests we might see a more sympathetic Pride. The casting of some prominent actors to fill the Pride's shoes, however, suggests that this may also be the case more broadly. It's hard to imagine casting Buffy the Vampire Slayer alum James Marsters as Chase's dad, Victor Stein, if he was not going to be given a prominent role.
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Again, though, the series seems to play with the details of the comic, while remaining true to its essence. Here, the Pride enters a secret lair, where they all put on matching red robes for their dark ceremony. The robes are reminiscent of those worn by Nico's parents—and only Nico's parents—in the comics, but giving them to everyone adds to the sense that there is something evil and cultish going on. (The mixed costumes of the Pride in the comic, on the other hand, lends more easily to the teenagers' jumping to the conclusion that their parents are supervillains rather than Satanists.)
Despite the similarities, however, there are reasons to think the series may ultimately deviate significantly from the comics. The last 15 seconds of the trailer is a montage of scenes, most of which have no comics counterpart, including Karolina's mother, Leslie Dean (Annie Wersching), holding the hand of what appears to be a dying or sick member of her alien species; a casket being carried at a funeral; and Chase shouting "Get away from her!" as he punches someone unseen offscreen.
This last vignette is particularly noteworthy, as it appears to be from a longer scene not in the comics that was reported to have been added to the show's first episode, in which Chase stops an attempted sexual assault on Karolina at a party. I have spoken with three people who have watched the scene, which was described to me as mostly well-handled, albeit perhaps cliché and groan-inducing, while being perhaps an odd choice to add into an adaptation of a book that did not originally feature sexual assault. The scene's existence suggests, however, that Marvel and Hulu may be willing to diverge significantly from the original series, while still maintaining much of its tone.
Executive produced by Josh Schwartz, Stephanie Savage, Jeph Loeb and Jim Chory, the 10-episode first season of Runaways debuts Tuesday, Nov. 21, on Hulu.