byChris Hewitt|Published on24th July 2026 at 12.14pm
People:
Adria Arjona
Dan Stevens
Adam Wingard
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Since the first trailer dropped a couple of months ago for Adam Wingard’s Onslaught — the first film from the American director since he left Godzilla and Kong to fight over their new empire — the debate has been raging in the Empire office: is it a sequel to Wingard’s 2014 blackly comedic action-horror classic, The Guest?
The case for the prosecution: like The Guest, Onslaught was it revolves around the notion of government-created, nigh-on unstoppable super soldiers. Like The Guest, Dan Stevens is in it. It’s got to be a sequel, right?
Sadly, the defence rested its case today when Wingard took to Ballroom 20 for a raucous, Kevin Smith-hosted panel promoting the movie, and he brought most of his cast with him, including star Adria Arjona, who plays a former soldier turned single mum who finds herself and her daughter in the crosshairs of said super soldiers: Rebecca Hall, Drew Starkey, and Stevens himself. But that’s not all — the new trailer for the movie, which will be online in a couple of days, also played in the room, and a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot of Stevens in old age makeup (and displaying a German accent) seems to have blown apart our hypothesis. Then Stevens went and smashed it to bits. “It is a spiritual sequel,” he said. “That said, it lives in the same universe.”
“I want to make a film where, spoiler alert, Dan Stevens licks people’s feet.”
Now we don’t know what to believe. For Wingard did indeed confirm that he sees this movie as the third and final part of a trilogy that began with You’re Next and continued with The Guest, and that this takes place in the same town as The Guest. But Stevens is not playing his all-American psycho here. Instead, he’s playing a foot-licking, possibly Nazi scientist who, along with Hall’s “dominatrix handler”, is responsible for the program that unleashes the super soldiers upon Arjona and her daughter.
So it isn’t a sequel to The Guest. But it also is. Confused? You will be. But you’ll also likely be too busy having a blast with Onslaught to care, for the film looks like a ton of fun, with Wingard talking about his reasons for making an ultra-violent 80s throwback as his pivot away from the MonsterVerse movies that have recently been his bread and butter. “This was the movie that I was like, ‘alright, I’ve been making all these big fucking movies for so many years,” he told the audience, “and what do I want to do? I want to make a film where, spoiler alert, Dan Stevens licks people’s feet.”
That noise you can hear is one Mr. Q Tarantino rushing out to buy tickets. We might join him. Not for the feet, but for the promise of relentless, uncompromising action, colourful characters (Starkey describes his character as a ‘hired government killer who’s on MDMA’), a John Carpenter-esque score, and Wingard getting final cut for the first time in his career. As a final surprise, the panel dropped a brief clip from the beginning of the movie, featuring Arjona shooting a bunch of pumpkins, while having a PTSD flashback to her days in combat, followed by a cracking title drop.
Audiences in America will get this in just a few weeks, when it opens on September 4. We’ll have to content ourselves with writing letters to our MP to try to nail down a UK release date. Let the Onslaught onslaught begin.
Stay tuned for more coming soon from San Diego Comic-Con 2026
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