Robert Downey Jr. may arguably be best known for portraying the genius Marvel Comics character Tony "Iron Man" Stark, but his next comic book effort will be on a completely different level. He and wife Susan Downey, through their production company Team Downey, are executive producing the new post-apocalyptic Netflix series Sweet Tooth, which has finally released its first trailer on the world, and it's just as wild and epic as anyone could have expected and hoped. Check it out above!
Sweet Tooth is a fantastic comic book series that was created by the prolific and brilliant writer and artist Jeff Lemire, and while it doesn't automatically seem like perfect fodder for a big-budget Netflix TV series, watching the trailer makes it obvious why everyone involved wanted to get on board. Beyond Robert Downey Jr. & Co., the behind-the-scenes creative team also includes showrunner Jim Mickle, who directed the disturbingly excellent horror remake We Are What We Are and created the fan-favorite SundanceTV drama Hap & Leonard, among other things. Sweet Tooth looks like it might be his mostly brightly lit work yet, but there's definitely a dark story being told here.
Within the Sweet Tooth universe, some kind of a cataclysmic event decimated Earth's population and possibly had an even stranger effect on the planet. (We get hints of it in the trailer, but not too much.) You see, babies born after the event are strangely human-animal hybrids, and you can imagine that the people that are left are not 100% comfortable with that being the new norm. More specifically, the series follows a young and sheltered boy who's forced to leave the comforts of his home to face the harshness of the outside world. He won't be alone, as he'll join a small group of other human-animal hybrids in order to figure out what happened to the world, and how their kind came to exist in it. Not the most straightforward mystery, but it's definitely one that kept readers hooked during both of the comic's runs.
As seen in the trailer, Sweet Tooth is headed up by young actor Christian Convery, who plays the young Gus, who was born as a hybrid between a human boy and a deer. And I cannot lie, the shots of him as a bitty deer-baby are kind of adorable. The show also stars MacGruber himself Will Forte as Gus' father, The Flash vet Neil Sandilands as the villainous General Steve Abbot - always a villain, that guy - Game of Thrones alum Nonso Anozie as Gus' race-swapped companion Tommy Jeppard, and Utopia's Adeel Akhtar as Dr. Singh, whose research might be able to reverse the bizarre string of hybrid births happening around the world. Unless it isn't.
You can bet that not everyone out there is fully down with a young deer-boy figuring out the secrets of modern day society. Especially since Gus might have secrets that others aren't aware of. Which presumably leads us to whoever the hell these people-animals are.
While we may not see Robert Downey Jr. rocking any comic book costumes in the near future, we can always keep our hooves, er, fingers crossed that he has some kind of a secret cameo coming in Sweet Tooth, which will make its grand debut on Netflix on Friday, June 4, at 3:01 a.m. ET. For those who already read through the original series, be sure to check out the sequel series that Jeff Lemire began publishing in 2020, Sweet Tooth: The Return.
