Ridley Scott has made a bold claim before, most notably about Gladiator II, so it’s fair to raise an eyebrow when he says The Dog Stars might be his best work since The Martian. But the final trailer, released this week, at least makes a strong case for why people are paying attention. This one hits theaters, IMAX, and premium large formats on August 28, 2026.
What The Dog Stars Is About
Based on Peter Heller’s bestselling novel, the film follows Hig (Jacob Elordi), a young pilot who has carved out a fragile but functional homestead in a brutal post-apocalyptic world alongside Bangley (Josh Brolin), a military survivalist. The pandemic that wiped out most of the population didn’t bring zombies or mutants, just other desperate people, which is arguably a scarier premise since the threat is entirely human.
Everything changes when Hig picks up a mysterious radio transmission and decides to leave the relative safety of his homestead to chase it, eventually finding Cima (Margaret Qualley), a sniper he starts to form a bond with. The trailer follows that arc: Hig reflecting on the life he lost, the ravaged Denver City Hall overrun with wild dogs, a tense night-vision sequence where Bangley holds off attackers while covering for Hig, and finally Hig and Cima boarding a small plane while evading their enemies.
Cast and Crew
The ensemble is stacked: Jacob Elordi, Josh Brolin, Margaret Qualley, Allison Janney, Benedict Wong, and Guy Pearce round out the cast, with Guy Pearce playing Pa, a survivor whose group operates under strict rules about dealing with unknowns like Hig. Mark L. Smith wrote the screenplay, and Ridley Scott produced alongside Michael Pruss, Smith himself, and Cliff Roberts. The film is distributed by 20th Century Studios on a reported $110 million budget.
The Brolin Almost-Quit Story
There’s a detail circulating alongside this trailer that’s honestly more interesting than most trailer breakdowns get: Josh Brolin apparently almost walked off the project after his very first day of shooting. Brolin had worked with Scott before on American Gangster, but something about Scott’s rapid, multi-camera shooting style on this set genuinely unsettled him enough that he called his agent wanting out immediately. He credited his agent with talking him into resting for a day before reconsidering, and he’s since said he’s glad he pushed through the adjustment period.
It’s a small anecdote, but it says something about how differently Scott was approaching this production compared to his more traditional work, and it lines up with how kinetic and unstable a lot of the trailer footage feels.
Tone and Score
The trailer is set to Nine Inch Nails’ “The Day The World Went Away,” which tells you a lot about the mood Scott is going for here. This isn’t shaping up to be an action-adventure with apocalypse dressing. It reads more like a survival drama that happens to have gunfights in it, closer in spirit to The Road than to Mad Max.
Should You Watch It?
If you go into The Dog Stars expecting Scott’s usual visual spectacle mixed with a grounded, character-first story about what people become when the systems holding society together disappear, this looks like a strong bet. The cast alone, Elordi coming off Frankenstein, Brolin fresh from Avengers: Endgame, Qualley building on The Substance, is about as strong a lineup as a mid-budget survival thriller gets right now. Whether it actually lives up to Scott’s own hype is the real question, since he’s made similar claims before that didn’t quite land with critics or audiences.
Mark August 28 down if grounded post-apocalyptic survival stories with strong emotional cores are your kind of thing.
