When the teaser trailer premiered to Cars 3, all we had to go on was the tagline that said “from this moment, everything will change.” That could mean anything, but when it was paired with a trailer that showed Lightning McQueen losing a race and ultimately crashing out in spectacular form, I was on the edge of my seat. Wow, what a way to tease the movie. Not only did the trailer show the hero crash, we got a glimpse of the villain passing McQueen just before the crash.
Then the next two trailers were released and my excitement grew. The movie shows us a different Lightning McQueen. He’s not the hotshot rookie sensation from the first movie. In one of the full length trailers we see a Lightning McQueen that has multiple sponsorship deals, which will as we are told in the movie, ‘ensure his legacy’. He’s coming to the end of his career, and the new younger racers like Jackson Storm, our sleeker faster racers, are the way of the future.
Here’s what I hope we see in Cars 3:
I want to see the underdog Lighting McQueen. He’s a racer, and based on everything we have seen in the trailers, a very successful one who has had a lot of crashes lately. Everyone else seems to know his racing days are done except Lightning. I want to see the older car trying to compete in the new era of racing, and I want to be drawn in by his story of how he chooses to end his career.
I want to see a movie that highlights the characters we have come to love from the first film. Sally actually has lines in the trailer and I am hopeful that, with her playing such a prominent role in the trailer, she and her relationship with McQueen might be more of a focus in the movie.
I want to see more Radiator Springs, and I want to spend more time with the characters that live there. I want to see how Flo, Sarge, Ramone, Guido, Luigi, Red, and Sally are doing, and I want to see Lightning having a life in the town. I missed Radiator Springs in Cars 2.
I want a malevolent bad guy. Jackson Storm seems to fit the mold of the typical younger, better athlete that has been seen in many other movies. I hope he doesn’t come off as one dimensional. I hope we get a chance to really appreciate him. What I don’t want to see is Storm and McQueen friends at the end of the movie.
I want as little of Mater as possible. I feel like Mater is a great character for the background that occasionally pops up and gets involved in the scene. I don’t think he should be a main character in the story. I like the fact that in all the trailers he seems to be very distant from McQueen.
I want to see a return to the roots. To me, Cars was a great movie because of the story and the characters that inhabited the film. We will never get Paul Newman’s Doc Hudson back, but I am encouraged with Chris Cooper’s Smokey Yunick character. The dynamic that the trailers are building between Lightning and Cruz Ramirez is also encouraging. Rust-eze has grown into a major corporation, and I will be interested to see how they handle the now older and failing Lightning McQueen. Do they kick him to the curb or do they stand by him like Lightning did at the end of the first Cars movie?
Most importantly, I want this movie to be the final act of Lightning McQueen. I don’t think we need to see anything more from this world in the feature film area, and I hope that Lightning McQueen goes out on top.