The Power Trailer: Prepare To Be Afraid Of Teenage Girls

While Disney+ and HBO Max are overrun by costumed Marvel and DC superheroes, Prime Video has carved out a niche for itself as an alternate source of ultra-violent Image Comics and Dynamite Entertainment adaptations like "Invincible" and "The Boys." With "The Power," Prime Video is looking more to the girls now, along with Naomi Alderman's bestselling 2016 novel, for a different kind of literary, super-powered tale: one that traffics in X-Men-like tropes yet ditches both yellow spandex and black leather for plainclothes feminist themes.

Winner of the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction in 2017, "The Power" has been described by The Washington Post as "our era's 'Handmaid's Tale.'" The story, per the publisher Penguin, is set in a near future where "girls find that with a flick of their fingers, they can inflict agonizing pain and even death." Suddenly, women are the dominant sex, able to reshape the world as an electrified matriarchy. It's a book that asks the question: "What if the power to hurt were in women's hands?"

For its globetrotting series adaptation of "The Power," which premieres next month, Prime Video has assembled a cast of familiar faces, including Toni Colette, John Leguizamo, "Moana" star Auli'i Cravalho, "Ted Lasso" regular Toheeb Jimoh, character actors Josh Charles and Eddie Marsan, and more.

If you were to just see this two-minute trailer for "The Power" out of context, you could be forgiven for thinking it's giving a pseudorealistic, "Chronicle"-like treatment to the X-Men myth, with the onset of puberty bringing about the manifestation of superpowers in young women so that they've got "electricity coming out of their hands." There's even a line where John Leguizamo's dad character says, "If it was one girl, I'd say it was a mutation," which winks at the idea of Marvel Comics mutants. Those are now emerging in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, too, thanks to last year's Disney+ series, "Ms. Marvel."

The key difference here, however, is that these young women all have the same power: shooting electricity from their hands. Some men will break out the fire extinguishers. Other will break out the tape recorders to document the dawn of a new matriarchy in "The Power."

Here's the official synopsis for "The Power" via Prime Video:

The world of "The Power" is our world, but for one twist of nature. Suddenly, and without warning, teenage girls develop the power to electrocute people at will. "The Power" follows a cast of remarkable characters from London to Seattle, Nigeria to Eastern Europe, as the Power evolves from a tingle in teenagers' collarbones to a complete reversal of the power balance of the world.

"The Power" premieres March 31, 2023, on Prime Video.