The trailer for Children of Blood and Bone hit today, and I’ve watched it three times already. Not because I was bored. Because there’s a lot happening in two and a half minutes, and some of it I loved, and some of it I need to talk through.

Let’s start with the obvious: this has the bones of a franchise. Gina Prince-Bythewood is directing. Thuso Mbedu leads as Zélie. And the supporting cast is not playing around — Regina King, Viola Davis, Cynthia Erivo, Idris Elba, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Amandla Stenberg. That is not a cast you assemble for a one-and-done. That is a cast you assemble when you believe you’re building something that runs for a decade. When I watched that trailer, I didn’t just see a movie. I saw the beginning of what could be one of the biggest Black-led franchises we’ve ever had — on the scale of what Black Panther did, but rooted in West African mythology instead of Afrofuturism. Different lane, same weight.

Now let’s talk about the music, because I have to be honest with you.

The trailer is cut to Beyoncé’s “Energy” — off Renaissance. And listen, I love that song. But something about it threw the whole trailer off for me. It didn’t match the tone of what I was watching. This is a story about an entire people having their magic — their power, their birthright — violently stripped away. That calls for something with weight, something ancestral. My mind immediately went to The Gift. That album was built for exactly this kind of moment — African instrumentation, spiritual undertones, the whole soundscape steeped in the continent this story comes from. “Energy” is a great record, but it’s a club record. This trailer needed a ceremony record. I’ll be curious to see what Tems and Burna Boy — who are actually scoring the film as executive music producer and music consultant — bring to the real thing, because based on their catalogs alone, I trust them to get closer to what I felt was missing here.

“This trailer needed a ceremony record.”

But here’s what I can’t stop thinking about, and it’s bigger than a needle drop.

The premise of this story — a people whose magic, whose spiritual power, gets violently taken from them by force — that is not subtle to me. That is our story. That is the transatlantic slave trade. That is generations of African people stripped of their traditions, their languages, their gods, and having Christianity forced onto them as the only acceptable faith. We are still living with the aftermath of that spiritual theft. A lot of us are still trying to find our way back to practices our ancestors carried long before anybody colonized anything. So when I watch Zélie fighting to reclaim magic that was stolen from her people, I’m not just watching a fantasy film. I’m watching a metaphor for something my own family lived through. That’s what makes this different from every other YA adaptation trying to be the next big thing. It’s not just spectacle. It’s memory.

And visually? It’s stunning. The costuming, the color palette, the CGI on the magic sequences, the way Orïsha itself is designed to feel like a real place with real history — you can tell nobody cut corners here. This is what it looks like when African tradition gets the production budget and the reverence it has always deserved on screen.

I already said it, but it’s worth repeating — Regina King, Viola Davis, and Cynthia Erivo sharing a film together is the kind of casting that makes you sit up. These are three women who’ve each carried entire projects on their own. Putting them in the same universe is a statement about how seriously this production is taking itself.

Children of Blood and Bone hits theaters January 15, 2027. I’ll be watching for the actual film score — and hoping it leans further into the ancestral, ceremonial sound this story deserves. Because if the trailer’s this good with a needle drop that didn’t fully fit, imagine what the finished film sounds like when everything lines up.

— By Kempire