'The Shallows' Trailer: Blake Lively Tries Not To Become Shark Food

You'd think the combined horrors of The Finest Hours and In the Heart of the Sea should be enough to discourage anyone from setting out on any body of water larger than a swimming pool, ever, but based on the box office receipts for both movies not a whole lot of people actually saw them. So just in case you're still thinking a trip out to sea might be a nice way to spend an afternoon, here comes Jaume Collet-Serra's The Shallows to disabuse you of that notion.

Blake Lively plays a surfer who heads out to catch some waves on a quiet beach. Few people are around, but there is a shark hanging out nearby, and it's decided Blake Lively is what it wants to have for lunch. After the creature attacks her, she's left stranded 200 yards from shore. Watch The Shallows trailer after the jump. 

The text here has a double meaning, kind of. "What was once in the deep is now in the shallows" could be referring to the title of this movie, which used to be called In the Deep. The script by Anthony Jaswinski landed him on the Black List in 2014, and had Louis Leterrier circling to direct at one point. At the time, the project was described as "a cross between 127 Hours meets Jaws, with a touch of Gravity thrown in for good measure"... which is more or less exactly what this trailer looks like.

For a film like this to work, though, it needs to have a strong performance at its center, and Lively (at least in my opinion) can be hit or miss. The Shallows trailer offers only a small taste of her work here, but let's hope for the best. In a year positively bloated with gargantuan superhero showdowns, each one seemingly longer and louder and more expensive than the last, we could do with a smaller, tighter thriller to mix things up.

The Shallows opens later this summer.

In the taut thriller The Shallows, Nancy (Blake Lively) is surfing alone on a secluded beach when she is attacked by a great white shark and stranded just a short distance from shore. Though she is only 200 yards from her survival, getting there proves the ultimate contest of wills. It's Jaws for a new generation.