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Code 8 | Official Trailer (HD) | Vertical Entertainment

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An indie sci-fi that began as a crowdfunded short is about to hit theaters as a full-blown action thriller.

Vertical Entertainment dropped the official trailer for Code 8 in late October 2019, giving audiences their first extended look at director Jeff Chan’s expansion of his own 2016 short film. The feature stars real-life cousins Robbie Amell and Stephen Amell as two men on opposite sides of a criminal operation built around a drug made from human suffering. It’s set for a limited theatrical and on-demand release on December 13, 2019.

• Chan and Chris Paré’s original 2016 short became a crowdfunding phenomenon, with an Indiegogo campaign fronted by Robbie and Stephen Amell raising over $1.7 million against a $200,000 goal, plus backing from Telefilm Canada and The Fyzz Facility.
• Robbie Amell plays electrokinetic day-laborer Connor Reed, who gets pulled into a criminal syndicate run by telekinetic Garrett Kelton (Stephen Amell) under drug boss Marcus Sutcliffe (Greg Bryk) to pay for his critically ill mother’s (Kari Matchett) treatment.
• The film runs 1 hour and 38 minutes and hits select theaters and VOD on December 13, 2019, distributed by Vertical Entertainment in the U.S. and Elevation Pictures in Canada.

Lincoln City and the Powers

The trailer plants viewers in Lincoln City, an alternate-world setting where roughly 4% of the population is born with what the film calls “Powers” — telekinesis, electrokinesis, and other abilities that once made these people valuable industrial labor. That status has flipped. Powers are now marginalized, pushed into poverty, and tracked by a militarized police force that patrols with autonomous robotic drone units, a detail the trailer leans on heavily to sell its surveillance-state atmosphere.

That setup gives Code 8 a different texture than most superhero-adjacent stories heading into theaters. Rather than costumed heroics, the footage frames its abilities as an underclass problem — something closer to an X-Men premise filtered through a blue-collar crime drama. Readers who track the genre’s current wave of powers-as-social-metaphor stories, like those covered in the best upcoming science-fiction movies roundups, will recognize the lane Code 8 is working in.

From a $200,000 Ask to a Feature Film

The path to this trailer started with a short film gamble. Chan’s 2016 short introduced the Code 8 world on a modest budget, but it was the Indiegogo push led by the Amell cousins that turned it into something bigger — donors pledged more than $1.7 million against an initial $200,000 target, an eightfold overshoot that convinced Telefilm Canada and The Fyzz Facility to put up additional financing. Colony Pictures produced the resulting feature, with Vertical Entertainment picking up U.S. distribution and Elevation Pictures handling the film domestically in Canada.

Psyke and the Sutcliffe Operation

At the center of the plot is Psyke, an illicit street drug the trailer identifies as manufactured from the spinal fluid of trafficked people with powers. Connor Reed gets drawn into Garrett Kelton’s crew, which operates under syndicate boss Marcus Sutcliffe (Greg Bryk), and the trailer’s action beats — heists, chases, and power-on-power confrontations — all trace back to that supply chain.

Psyke is manufactured from the spinal fluid of trafficked individuals with powers — the drug that turns Connor Reed’s desperation into a criminal career.

It’s a grim engine for a genre film, closer in spirit to a drug-trade thriller than a comic-book adaptation, and it’s the mechanism the trailer uses to explain why a man with electrokinetic abilities ends up running with Kelton’s crew instead of using his power for anything resembling heroics.

Officers Park and Davis Close In

On the law-enforcement side, the trailer introduces Officer Park (Sung Kang) and Officer Davis (Aaron Abrams), the pair tasked with tracking the syndicate’s armed heists. Their pursuit of Connor and Kelton supplies the trailer’s escalating cat-and-mouse structure, with the drone units and militarized tactics giving the chases a harder edge than a typical cops-and-robbers setup. The dynamic recalls the powers-versus-authority tension found in other recent genre entries, including the drug-fueled premise of Project Power, though Code 8 got there first with its December 2019 release date.

Code 8 arrives in select theaters and on-demand December 13, 2019 — the same weekend window studios often use to let smaller genre titles find an audience without going head-to-head with major franchise releases. For a project that started as a short film funded by fans on Indiegogo, that’s the payoff: a real theatrical date, a runtime, and a distributor lined up on both sides of the border.