It would be more than fair to categorize me as a lover of bad cinema. In my years at Paste, I’ve authored several different columns dedicated to trash cinema or so-bad-they’re-good films, and hosted innumerable bad movie nights. And obviously, a strong familiarity with The Room can be assumed, given its status as perhaps the most famous film in the modern “bad movie” canon. Everything about The Room is mythological, wreathed in confusion even after actor Greg Sestero’s 2013 book The Disaster Artist and its subsequent film adaptation explained some aspects of how it (and its eccentric creator Tommy Wiseau) came to be. But the one thing we’ve never had is a proper directorial follow-up from Wiseau. That is, until now, with the incredibly titled Big Shark.
Does that title and this premise feel vaguely familiar? Well, perhaps it should, because Tommy Wiseau has been working on Big Shark for a ridiculously long time at this point. I wrote a news post back in 2019, in fact, announcing that Wiseau had been teasing the film at screenings of The Room! Principal photography was reportedly carried out more than four years ago, in February of 2019, but the ever-prickly Wiseau has repeatedly delayed and pushed back a final release for the film, claiming at various points in 2021 and 2022 that additional filming was still underway. Yesterday, though, an “official trailer” for Big Shark finally arrived on Wiseau’s own YouTube channel, and woah … it’s just as utterly inscrutable as you’d likely expect.
Big Shark is reportedly about “three firefighters,” played by Wiseau, Isaiah LaBorde, and returning The Room co-star Sestero, who “must save New Orleans from a killer shark.” Why are the streets of New Orleans completely underwater in the first place, and infested with sharks of the big variety? Who can say? The New Orleans setting seems fitting, though, as Wiseau often stated in interviews over the years that he was originally from The Big Easy, even if his mysterious accent seemed to strongly hint at Eastern European origins.
As for the content of the trailer, this truly feels as if it was assembled by Wiseau and not a single other soul. The first 60 seconds are largely spent on seemingly unrelated boxing footage, before a sudden swerve into shark. The second half of the “trailer,” meanwhile, is simply an advertisement for Wiseau’s own brand of underwear and memorabilia, a project he’s been plugging away at for more than a decade at this point. Why not spend half of your Big Shark trailer hawking your wares, right?
Big Shark is reportedly set for an August, 2023 premiere in New York, but the project has been postponed so many times before it’s hard to have a lot of faith in that window. Still, at least there’s a trailer this time, right? Check it out below, and keep those Room sex candles burning in the hope that Big Shark finally has its day in the sun.