Full ‘Whalefall’ Trailer: Austin Abrams Experiences All Emotions In The Belly Of The Beast
UPDATED, Sept. 10, 10:30 a.m.: A new full trailer for 20th Century Studios’ Whalefall, based on the best-selling book by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Daniel Kraus, has arrived.
The adrenaline-spiked clip offers a longer look at Austin Abrams’ scuba diver Jay Gardiner in the stomach of an 80-foot, 60-ton sperm whale, where he has an hour’s worth of oxygen to either find a way out or become digested by the ocean mammal.
“Son, what are you gonna do?” Jay’s father’s (Josh Brolin) voice echoes in his head as he panics in the cramped space of the whale’s organ. “Just accept your fate?”
The diver flashes back to blunt words of wisdom from his father on a fishing boat: “Remember, survivors survive.”
Back in the stomach, Jay tries to work with what he’s got, hearing another nugget from his dad: “The ocean always provides.”
Still more flashbacks point to contentious moments between father and son in which Brolin says “You don’t listen to me, you’re dead!” and an argument in which he tells Jay to “Grow up.”
Not only does he have the stomach walls closing in and muscles contracting, but Jay gets sucked into the whale with a squid, whose tentacles provide another obstacle for him to move past. At the end of the trailer, the whale breaches, but gravity looks to undo a lot of the work Jay has done to get close to exiting the beast.
PREVIOUS, June 9, 9 a.m.: 20th Century Studios has released the first trailer for Whalefall, the adaptation of Daniel Kraus’ novel coming to theaters in October.
The film — which stars Austin Abrams, Josh Brolin, Elisabeth Shue, John Ortiz and more — is described as The Martian meets 127 Hours, centering on a scuba diver in search of his deceased father’s remains. The diver gets swallowed by an 80-foot, 60-ton sperm whale and has only one hour to escape before his oxygen runs out. After giving up on life, the young man is surprised to find a reason to live in the most dangerous and unlikely of places.
Brian Duffield, who wrote No One Will Save You (2023) and Spontaneous (2020) in addition to serving as producer on Cocaine Bear (2023), co-wrote the screenplay with author Kraus — whose book Angel Down won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. We first told you that Imagine also has plans to adapt Angel Down into a film.
Deadline dove deeper into the making of the film on a set visit during production in September 2025 at Radford Studios, speaking to Duffield, Kraus and more about the intricate process of shooting the majority of a movie inside a whale’s stomach.
Duffield found out about the book through Twitter when Kraus signed his publishing deal and teased the novel’s premise, and the director “slid into [Kraus’] DMs” to say he wanted the rights.
“I’d never talked to him before, and then he was like, ‘It’s not done.’ And I was like, ‘Well, as soon as it’s done, send it to me.’ And then for some reason, he did, and that was before [No One Will Save You] had even come out, so I only had a very small indie movie to my name at the at the moment,” the writer director recalled during the set visit. “I read the book. Didn’t know anything about the father son stuff in it. I remember reading it as soon as he sent me, I was like, ‘I got to read this tonight to make him know that I’m serious,’ and also to see if it was good and it was f–king amazing.”
Brian Grazer and Ron Howard’s Imagine Entertainment eventually came aboard in August 2023 during the dual labor strikes in Hollywood. Duffield’s son was one or two at the time, which gave him more access to the father and son themes throughout the story.
“I remember reading it with my son sleeping beside me and being like,’ Oh my God.’ I was really excited about the the whale stuff, and then the all the Father Son stuff really was very powerful and painful and all the right ways,” the director told Deadline. “When I got on the phone with [Daniel], we talked about dads and being a dad and all that kind of stuff. The miracle of the book and hopefully of the movie is, when it ends, you primarily are talking about the relationships, and then the whale is third or fourth build, which for a movie that’s almost entirely inside of a whale it feels impossible, but somehow he pulls it off. He’s just a phenomenal storyteller.”
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.