The First ‘Downton Abbey’ Movie Trailer Makes Its Big Debut

The first Downton Abbey movie trailer is here and is giving fans of the television series a little holiday treat with the first glimpse of Highclere Castle back in action with the Crawley family and their staff. The cast has just wrapped filming of the movie, and even though the plotline is still under wraps, show creator Julian Fellowes wanted to share an early trailer before the official promotions for the movie begin.

Entertainment Weekly introduces what is being called the teaser trailer, which features sweeping views of the house and the grounds surrounding Highclere Castle, also known fondly as Downton Abbey from the PBS Masterpiece series of the same name. The camera pans through the house while we hear the traditional Downton Abbey theme music, titled “Suite” by John Lunn.

Like the introduction to the original series, we see the bells which ring to alert the staff that a member of the family needs help or has woken up.

Executive producer Gareth Neame says that most of the cast believes that they might have pulled the plug on the series too soon.

“We felt we were quitting while we were ahead. We wanted to go while people still wanted more. It was a way to sweeten the pill for the millions of fans around the world — the show was coming to an end, but we hoped to put a movie together.”

The movie will be released in September of 2019, just a year after the shoot started back in England with nearly the whole surviving cast. Neame says that the plan for the big screen version is to make everything look a bit more sumptuous and rich.

“We had to do everything that all the fans wanted, but we had to do something that was fresh and original. We wanted a kind of storyline and sense of scale and production value that exceeded even the very high production values the TV show was remembered for. On the big screen, it just had to look a little bit more lavish and a little bit bigger and better.”

One of the holdouts for the Downton Abbey movie was Dame Maggie Smith, who assumed if there was another chapter in the story of the Crawley family, then it would start with the funeral of her character, Dowager Countess Violet Crawley, the family matriarch.

“I was firmly convinced it would start with the funeral. I could croak it and it would just start with the body.”

But while we don’t know much about the plot, we do know that Smith will appear on the big screen very much alive.