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Since wrapping up his run as Drax in the Guardians of the Galaxy films, Dave Bautista has certainly made a habit of collaborating with autuer filmmakers. He has worked with Denis Villeneuve on Dune, Rian Johnson on Glass Onion, and Gia Coppola on The Last Showgirl. The former wrestler has been open about wanting to be taken seriously as a character actor, and his choices have largely backed that up. Now one of the strangest swings on his slate is about to surface, as the film has just landed a coveted slot at one of the fall's most important festivals.
The Toronto International Film Festival has added the Zellner brothers' alien invasion comedy Alpha Gang to its Special Presentations lineup, where it will make its international premiere in September. Bautista stars alongside Cate Blanchett, Chris Pine, Riley Keough, and Lily-Rose Depp in the film, which follows an alien crew posing as a 1950s biker gang while attempting to take over Earth. Blanchett plays the alien leader, Alpha One, and the invasion starts to fall apart once the gang begins catching human feelings.
Alpha Gang is one of five new Special Presentations titles announced by TIFF. The batch also includes Rachel Morrison's romance Love of Your Life with Margaret Qualley and Aaron Pierre, Bassam Tariq's Houston-set hitman thriller Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother led by Mahershala Ali. Ben Shirinian's The Housewife and Benjamín Naishtat's Glaxo are part of the lineup as well. Check out the first-look image below:
'Alpha Gang' Took A Long And Winding Road To Get Here
The project was first announced in June 2020. At the time, Andrea Riseborough and Jon Hamm were set to star, and filming was expected to begin in Europe in 2021. That version never got off the ground, and the pandemic delays are actually what opened the door for the Zellners to make Sasquatch Sunset in the meantime, the near-wordless Bigfoot movie that became a Sundance talking point in 2024. After that, the film effectively started over.
Blanchett joined Alpha Gang in May 2024, with Bautista following that October as the new cast fell into place. Even that lineup didn't fully survive, as the film was recast with Chris Pine and Lily-Rose Depp as filming started in Budapest in mid-2025. The Zellners tend to make deliberately odd films, and their work can be divisive, as Sasquatch Sunset showed. Even so, Bautista's interest in a project like this is easy to understand. A sci-fi comedy about aliens being complicated by human emotion fits fairly well with the sincere, slightly melancholy lane he has been exploring since Blade Runner 2049.
