'Glass' Trailer: M. Night Shyamalan Unleashes The Beast With His 'Unbreakable' And 'Split' Sequel [Comic-Con 2018]

The trailer for M. Night Shyamalan's Glass debuted at Comic-Con, and now you can watch it from the comfort of your own home. Will Glass deliver the Unbreakable sequel fans have been waiting for for 18 years? Time will tell.

While it wasn't his first film, Shyamalan's 1999 ghost story The Sixth Sense helped make him a household name. The filmmaker was red hot, and he followed Sixth Sense up with Unbreakable – one of his best films. It was a low-key, muted movie about superheroes – a film that took superheroes very seriously, long before Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy. In the years to come, Shyamalan's star would decline a bit – although I personally remained a fan. While others started to turn their back on the filmmaker, I enjoyed his unjustly maligned The Village, and even thought his admittedly stupid The Happening fell into the so-bad-it's-good category.

Shyamalan experienced a resurgence with his well-received 2015 found-footage film The Visit. He followed that up with the even-better Split, a film featuring great performances from James McAvoy and Anya Taylor-Joy. Shyamalan had long cultivated a reputation as the master of the twist ending, but Split had one of his biggest twists of all: as the film concluded, the filmmaker cut to a shot of Bruce Willis playing his Unbreakable character David Dunn. It was confirmation that Split was set in the same universe as that film, and it soon resulted in Shyamalan announcing Glass – a movie that would tie together Unbreakable and Split, bringing back the main casts of both.

In the film, Willis' super-strong, unbreakable David Dunn, his nemesis Elijah Price, aka Mr. Glass (Samuel L. Jackson), and McAvoy's split-personality character Kevin Wendell Crumb, who is host to a supernatural being known as The Beast, all find themselves locked up together in the same institution. At least, that's part of what's going on here. The film's initial synopsis stated:

Following the conclusion of Split, Glass finds Dunn pursuing Crumb's superhuman figure of The Beast in a series of escalating encounters, while the shadowy presence of Price emerges as an orchestrator who holds secrets critical to both men.

This hints at a bigger story beyond "three characters locked up together in the same loony bin." I'm sure Shyamalan has plenty of twists and turns up his sleeve, just waiting to shock us all.

In addition to Willis, Jackson and McAvoy, Split's Anya Taylor-Joy also returns for Glass. Also returning: Spencer Treat Clark, once again playing Willis' son from Unbreakable, and Charlayne Woodard, reprising her role as Jackson's mother. Sadly, Unbreakable's Robin Wright is not returning. A new addition to the M. Night Shyamalan Cinematic Universe, though, is Sarah Paulson, who plays a psychiatrist treating the three main characters. "She deals with people that think they're comic-book characters," Shyamalan told EW. "It's kind of the modern-day equivalent of 'I think I'm Jesus' or 'I'm an emperor.'"

Glass opens January 18, 2019.

M. Night Shyamalan brings together the narratives of two of his standout originals—2000's Unbreakable, from Touchstone, and 2016's Split, from Universal—in one explosive, all-new comic-book thriller: Glass. From Unbreakable, Bruce Willis returns as David Dunn as does Samuel L. Jackson as Elijah Price, known also by his pseudonym Mr. Glass. Joining from Split are James McAvoy, reprising his role as Kevin Wendell Crumb and the multiple identities who reside within, and Anya Taylor-Joy as Casey Cooke, the only captive to survive an encounter with The Beast. Following the conclusion of Split, Glass finds Dunn pursuing Crumb's superhuman figure of The Beast in a series of escalating encounters, while the shadowy presence of Price emerges as an orchestrator who holds secrets critical to both men.