When it was announced that James McTeigue had cast John Cusack in the role of Edgar Allan Poe in The Raven eyebrows were raised and expectations gamely followed.

A fictionalised account of the author’s involvement in a police investigation of a serial killer using his work as inspiration seemed like a novel concept and some moody first look images flitted from the set giving the impression that this would be a suitably dark cinematic outing for the man who puts the ‘Poe’ in Poet.

Now that we’ve got a first look at the trailer it seems Relativity Media have served up a unique Edgar A Poe (where the ‘A’ stands for ACKSHUN) and it cannot be a coincidence that this looks very similar to Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes films.

Neither a hideously overburdened bandwagon, nor a particularly bad move and there are some nicely grisly moments in amongst the shouting and there’s a hint of Sleepy Hollow in the mix too. It’ll be interesting to see if Clive Owen is cast as Chuck Dickens: Workhouse Liberator in the next year or so.

The movie stars John Cusack, Luke Evans, Alice Eve, Brendan Gleeson? and Oliver Jackson-Cohen, directed by James McTeigue and is out in the States on March of next year with a UK date to be announced.

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