Entertainment Weekly has scored an exclusive clip from Dave Bautista‘s latest actioner, Bushwick. The Jonathan Milott & Cary Murnion-directed project carries a script by Nick Damici & Graham Reznick. Bushwick stars Bautista, Brittany Snow, Arturo Castro, Angelic Zambrana, and Jeff Lima. The XYZ Films action thriller will premiere later this month at the Sundance Film Festival, where it will be seeking U.S. distribution.
Dave Bautista has been consistently working ever since he fully entered the film industry seven years ago, popping up in such films as Riddick and The Man With The Iron Fists. Since hitting the big-time with his role as Drax the Destroyer in Guardians of the Galaxy, the professional wrestler turned actor has regularly juggled big studio work (Spectre) with starring roles in smaller projects like Scott Mann’s Heist, Steven C. Miller’s Marauders, and the martial arts reboot, Kickboxer: Vengeance.
This year’s Bautista-featuring blockbuster offerings are James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (arriving May 5th) and Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (arriving October 6th). On the smaller front, in addition to Bushwick, the actor has a number of films arriving in 2017. Chief among these are The Warrior’s Gate, a Luc Besson-production international action co-production with China, and Final Score, which re-teams him with director Scott Mann (The Tournament, Heist).
Bautista is also expected to reprise his role as Drax the Destroyer again in Marvel’s Avengers: Infinity War in May next year, as well as its still-untitled follow-up in May 2019. A fifth reprisal of the role in an unannounced (but inevitable) Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is all but a lock. All things said, the actor has carved out a great career for himself since leaving the WWE, who notoriously refused to allow him to star in any of their films. That rebuttal ultimately pushed Bautista to abandon professional wrestling as a career, a move I’m sure most of us agree was the right one to make.
