Brad Pitt Fights to Survive the Alaskan Wilderness With a Battle-Scarred Dog in HEART OF THE BEAST Trailer

Brad Pitt returns to the wilderness in Paramount's survival thriller Heart of the Beast, reuniting with Fury director David Ayer for what could be his most raw performance yet.

In the film, a plane goes down somewhere deep in the Alaskan wilderness. The man who walks away from the wreckage is a former Special Forces soldier named James Belmont, he's got a three-legged combat dog named Odin by his side, and the two of them are going to have to claw their way back to civilization through one of the most unforgiving landscapes on the planet.

Paramount has released the first trailer for Heart of the Beast, and it’s everything fans of grimy, no-frills survival cinema could have hoped for.

The footage opens with flashes of James and Odin's shared military history, filling in just enough backstory to make their bond feel earned before the crash tears everything apart.

The footage flashes back to their time in the military, revealing that the German Shepherd lost his teeth and a leg in battle. And yet here the dog is again, back in the fight, doing what he was trained to do: protect his person.

Pitt's character battles the elements and embarks on a desperate attempt to stay alive, climbing mountains and crossing rivers. The trailer captures both the scale of the wilderness and the intimacy of what's really at stake, which isn't survival in the abstract but the survival of this specific man and this specific dog, together.

Pitt, for his part, looks like he found something to dig into here. He looks like he gives a haunted performance as a man struggling with PTSD, but the true standout may be the retired service dog who protects him from bears, wolves and other beasts.

There are two lines from the trailer that they tell you everything about what kind of movie Ayer is making here First: "It's not the size of the dog in the fight that matters, it's the size of the fight in the dog." And then, after a harrowing river crossing nearly takes both man and animal under: "One last mission. Were not going to die out here."

The reunion between these two talents has been a long time coming. After being in development for almost a decade, Heart of the Beast marks the first time Pitt and Ayer have worked together since Fury, their brutal 2014 World War II drama that put five men in a tank and dared audiences to look away.

Where that film was built on the claustrophobia of war and the bonds formed within a crew, this one strips everything back even further to just a man, his dog, and the wilderness.

Ayer admitted he cried while reading through the script for the first time, comparing it to a "tone poem, in a sense." James and his dog, Odin, are "constantly rescuing each other" throughout the film, with the two characters feeling like "co-equals in this story."

Principal photography began in March 2025 in Queenstown, New Zealand, and wrapped in May of that year. The filming locations also included Lake Wakatipu, Glenorchy, Mount Aspiring National Park, and Milford Sound.

The film is set in Alaska but was shot in New Zealand, and Ayer pushed to film on terrain that had genuinely never been used for a production before. "No one's ever filmed there before," said Ayer, "and it took a lot of liaising with the New Zealand government and conservationist people to show them that we were going to be good citizens and tread really lightly on what is sacred land."

Rounding out the cast are Oscar winner J.K. Simmons and Anna Lambe, with the script written by Cameron Alexander. Producers on the film notably includes Damien Chazelle, the filmmaker behind Whiplash and La La Land, who also worked with Pitt on Babylon.

Heart of the Beast opens in theaters on September 25, 2026.