The Meg Trailer: Jason Statham Battles Giant Prehistoric Shark

Jaws has nothing on this bad boy.

Warner Bros. has unleashed the first trailer for its upcoming summer shark flick The Meg, starring Jason Statham as an expert deep sea rescue diver named Jonas Taylor. Shot on location in China and New Zealand, this surprisingly comedic thriller centers on a 75-foot-long prehistoric shark known as the Megalodon — the largest shark in history — that attacks an international observation team's deep-sea submersible, leaving them trapped on the floor of the deepest trench in the Pacific Ocean, unable to escape. 

Not only is The Meg asking audiences to suspend disbelief and just accept that the massive prehistoric Megalodon didn't actually go extinct around two million years ago and was instead discovered off the coast of China in the present day, it's also suggesting they go with the idea that the terrifying sea monster can, through endangering the lives of the research crew, also jeopardize the entire fate of the ocean itself. 

The trailer sets up this slightly goofy premise, seeing Taylor (Statham) team up with a visionary Chinese oceanographer (Skiptrace's Winston Chao), despite his daughter Suyin (Transformers: Age of Extinction's Li Bingbing) objecting his participation, to track down the disabled observation team and save them from the Megalodon. A secret Taylor keeps hidden, however, is that he's faced off against ol' Meg before, and now must fight his own fears if he is to save the innocent people from dying at the bottom of the ocean. 

The Meg trailer also features the requisite joke about Shark Week, a blithe (if not a little on-the-nose) montage of beach-goers and boat-trippers set to Bobby Darin's "Beyond the Sea," and what could be a reference to the maverick shark movie itself, Jaws. 

Take a look above.

Rounding out the cast of The Meg are Rainn Wilson (The Office), Ruby Rose (Orange Is the New Black, John Wick: Chapter 2), Page Kennedy (Rush Hour), Jessica McNamee (The Vow, Sirens), Ólafur Darri Ólafsson (The BFG, The Missing), Robert Taylor (Focus, Longmire), Cliff Curtis (The Dark Horse, Fear the Walking Dead), Sophia Shuya Cai (Somewhere Only We Know), and Masi Oka (Hawaii Five-0, Heroes).

Directed by National Treasure franchise filmmaker Jon Turteltaub, based on the New York Times best-selling science fiction novel Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror by Steve Alten, The Meg will take a bite out of the box office on August 10.