Grab The Marshmallows & Watch Michael B. Jordan Bring The Fire In Fahrenheit 451

Michael B. Jordan, lover of anime and current star of Black Panther, will soon be making literal fire — we already know that he is fire, now he's making fire, get it? — in the HBO movie rendition of Fahrenheit 451. HBO dropped the trailer today, a fiery nugget of future good TV, and it features Jordan at his very best. He growls, he stares, and, at one point, he looks at Captain Beatty (Michael Shannon, a different sort of snack) and says, "I want to burn." He's like the Killmonger, but instead of mongering for human kills, he's hungering to blaze books.

This is the first full trailer HBO has released for the series. The first teaser emerged last month, but was little more than just some burning books with some ominous underscoring. The highly-anticipated adaptation has received praise for its casting — two of the movie's leads, Jordan and the actress playing his character's wife Laura Harrier, are people of color, not to mention the director Ramin Bahrani (99 Homes, Man Push Cart) is Iranian American. The movie also features YouTube personality Lilly Singh, who will, fittingly, play a vlogger.

Fahrenheit 451 is based on Ray Bradbury's novel of the same name, a dystopian allegory about the perils of censorship. In Bradbury's imagined future, books are verboten. Jordan will play Guy Montag, a 'fireman' burdened with the task of burning books. Over time, Montag starts to question his faith in the bookless society. Maybe, er, books have value? (What's a book? This is the internet.) Given the way society is currently toggling with media, politics, and potential censorship, Fahrenheit 451 feels all the more prescient.

"We started working on this a year before the election,” Bahrani said at a 2018 Television Critics Association panel, according to Nerdist, “and politically things are [now] going in a very strange direction, and it’s been going in that direction for awhile. … And I don’t want us to forget what Bradbury said: ‘we asked for this.’ We’re electing to give it all away to [our phones].”

Watch the full trailer, below. Fahrenheit 451 will premiere on HBO in the spring.