'Green Hornet' Trailer Debut with Seth Rogen

'The Green Hornet' After years of speculation, a few starts and stops, a change in release date and finally the announcement that it will be released in 3D, The Green Hornet is finally set for release January 14, 2011. This gives the post-production team a little more time to work on the visual effects and also ensure that the post 3D process, which has drawn criticism in recent transitions of Alice in Wonderland and Clash of the Titans, looks as close to a movie shot in 3D as possible. It also gives Sony a little more time to gear up their PR machine, a process which began earlier today with the release of the first images from the film featuring Seth Rogen as Britt Reid (aka The Green Hornet), Jay Chou as Kato and Christophe Waltz as the villain, Chudnofsky.

Tonight the first trailer for Green Hornet is set to debut on The Jimmy Kimmel Show and then online at 12:45 a.m. EST. Fandango was part of a select group of journalists invited to an early screening of the trailer in Hollywood followed by an evening backstage at Kimmel with Rogen, Gondry, Green Hornet co-writerEvan Goldberg and producer Neil Moritz.

Rogen, Gondry and crew briefly introduced the trailer inside the Mann Chinese theater in Hollywood before showing it twice in a row. It starts with a brief intro to Britt Reid, the son of a wealthy newspaper publisher. After a night of debauchery partying the night away with pals and starlets, Reid’s world is turned upside down by his father’s (Tom Wilkinson) murder. Left with a wealth of resources and in need of a new sense of purpose, he turns to his father’s right hand man, Kato, to cook up a scheme to fight crime incognito by posing as criminals.

With the set-up out of the way, the rest of the trailer showcases the bombastic action, featuring blaring machine guns, high tech weaponry, gadgets 'The Green Hornet' and cars flying through the air. Green Hornet fans should be happy to know that Black Beauty does indeed make an appearance and even shows off a bit of her ample assets. But we’ll let you see the rest of the action for yourself tonight.

After checking out the trailer, we spoke with Rogen about the big project, which he has been fighting to bring to screen for years. He’s also received a fair bit of criticism for his involvement. Some fans, it seems, have had a bit of difficulty swallowing this funny-man as an action hero. “I read the internet,” says Rogen with a laugh. “I’m one of the people that sees this stuff. I’m the type of person to blindly make generalizations on things I know nothing about, so I’m not surprised people did it to us. The only thing that changes my mind is when I start seeing material and it looks awesome. I knew that’s what we needed to do.”

Another challenge is creating a familiarity for audiences with a character that first began as a radio program in the ‘30s. “Iron Man, to me, is a good example,” says Rogen. “I remember definitively my girlfriend having no clue who Iron Man was. How did they introduce the trailer? We couldn’t look at Batman trailers because everyone knows who Batman is. We couldn’t look at Spider-Man. Then we looked at Kick-Ass, for example, which I loved, but I think they tried so consciously to make themselves seem different that it actually alienated itself from a lot of the people that like superhero movies. A lot of movies say they’re different and some movies just are different and that’s what we had to try to do. We had to be confident in the fact that we made a movie that was genuinely original and hope that the material would ultimately reflect that by the time the release date came around.”

Christophe Waltz in 'The Green Hornet' It was recently announced that Green Hornet would be debuting in 3D, which Rogen and Gondry had been fighting for since the start of production. “To be honest, we were always hoping to go 3D,” says Gondry. “We were so thrilled to be able to execute this in 3D.”

As mentioned above, fans have voiced some concerns that the 3D was merely to cash in rather than to enhance the release, but Rogen warns fans not to judge too quickly. “Its like any other visual effect,” says Rogen. “There’s really good applications of it and really bad applications of it. It all depends on whose hands it’s in. We hope to do a really good version.”

While talking backstage to Rogen and Gondry, the technical team behind Jimmy Kimmel was scrambling a bit. As it turns out, a control room meltdown halted the airing of 'The Green Hornet' tonight’s episode. Kimmel and co. tried everything they could to salvage the episode, even going as far as to shoot an interview with Rogen in front of the studio audience on Kimmel’s laptop, but in the end they weren’t able to meet the deadline for the east coast broadcast.

The Green Hornet trailer will still debut online tonight, but Rogen’s appearance on Kimmel must wait. The sure-to-be-unique laptop interview, shot on Apple’s Photo Booth program, will instead air on tomorrow night’s episode of The Jimmy Kimmel Show. For now you can check out these four new images from Green Hornet as well as the trailer debut tonight online at 12:45 a.m. EST.

The Green Hornet opens in theaters nationwide January 14, 2011.

Tags: Seth Rogen, The Green Hornet