Gemini Man Trailer Explains Why They Cloned Will Smith, Not Nelson Mandela

We have a new trailer for Gemini Man, in which Will Smith (again) fights Will Smith. It's a bit spoiler-y, so you might want to avoid it. There are two different versions of the trailer — one released in the US and one for international audiences — with some differences in footage and dialogue. The latter one has a joke about Nelson Mandela and why they cloned Smith's hitman and not the South African leader. Gemini Man is the story of an ageing assassin named Henry Brogen (Smith), who finds himself being chased by a younger clone named Junior (Smith, via CGI) who can somehow predict every move of his. It brings Ang Lee back to the world of big VFX filmmaking, after Life of Pi in 2012.

The new Gemini Man trailer (from the US) opens with a mini-trailer where Junior proclaims he's the best, only to be reminded by Brogen — who's pointing a gun at him — that he's “obviously not the best”. Henry's voice-over then leads into the trailer, which is reminiscent of what we've heard in the trailer, laid over footage we've previously seen as well. We get new footage half a minute into the trailer, as the two Smiths talk about the younger one's first kill, before the older one explains that Henry's former mentor Clay (Clive Owen) took his blood 25 years ago to create Junior.

Not happy with what he's being told, Junior snaps and the two fight, but he later confronts Clay who tries to explain himself: “The whole point of this thing was to give you all of Henry's gifts without his pain.” Henry's ally and fellow hitwoman Danny (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) then joins the fray, asking Henry if his own government has ever gone after him. We then launch into several action scenes one after another, before Henry meets Clay in a scene where he rhetorically asks him why he didn't make an army full of his clones.

“You should be flattered,” Clay says, only for Henry to shout back: “You should be dead.” The Gemini Man trailer ends how it started, with the two Smiths facing each other. Henry then throws up a mysterious question: “Because what if somebody actually knew what we really are?”

The international version of the new Gemini Man trailer (above) features a bunch of additional footage, including a new opening in which Henry quietly escapes and then takes out government operatives sent to ambush him at his home, and the aforementioned Mandela joke. Explaining why they possibly didn't clone the great leader, Danny deadpans: “Nelson Mandela couldn't kill a man on a moving train from 2 kilometres away.”

On a premise level, Gemini Man sounds like a reversal of Star Wars: The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson's 2012 sci-fi drama Looper, in which the older version of the hitman (Bruce Willis) time travelled to the past to kill his younger self (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). But it's worth nothing it's been in the works for over two decades, falling into development hell for years altogether owing to technical troubles.

Written by Game of Thrones co-creator David Benioff, Billy Ray (The Hunger Games), and Darren Lemke (Goosebumps), Gemini Man is a production of Skydance Media, Jerry Bruckheimer Films, and Fosun Pictures. Paramount Pictures is the distributor, with Viacom18 Motion Pictures handling distribution in India where it has a tie-up with Paramount.

If you're interested in the Hindi-, Tamil-, and Telugu-language versions of the new Gemini trailer, we've you covered as well.

Gemini Man is out October 11 in cinemas in India in English, Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu.