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Matthew McConaughey Returns to the Big Screen as a Bluegrass Honey Farmer in ‘The Rivals of Amziah King’ Trailer
Matthew McConaughey returns to theaters in The Rivals of Amziah King, an Oklahoma-set drama about bluegrass, honey, and family conflict.
Matthew McConaughey is heading back to movie theaters for the first time since 2019, and the first trailer for The Rivals of Amziah King makes clear the return is being framed as a rural American showdown with music, family, and honey production all tangled together.
The indie drama, which premiered at South by Southwest in 2025 and is set for release on Aug. 14, reunites the actor with a sharply defined offbeat role. Written and directed by Andrew Patterson, best known for The Vast of Night, the film also stars Kurt Russell, Cole Sprouse, Angelina LookingGlass, and Jake Horowitz. McConaughey plays Amziah King, a charismatic honey farmer and bluegrass picker who leads a band of misfits while running what the synopsis calls the town’s premier honey-making operation.
It unfolds in the “deep backwoods” of rural Oklahoma and follows Amziah as he tries to hold together a family business that is both lucrative and vulnerable. When his estranged foster daughter, played by LookingGlass, unexpectedly comes back into his life, he sees a chance to repair that relationship and build something lasting. The problem, as the film positions it, is that the honey business is every bit as ruthless as any other local power structure.
The trailer leans into that tension, cutting between jam sessions, scenes of McConaughey reconnecting with his daughter, and the machinery of a big harvest. Russell appears as part of the looming conflict, suggesting a rivalry that is less about outright villainy than about control, inheritance, and survival. When the prized honey crop goes missing, LookingGlass’s character vows revenge and promises to bring the “liquid gold” back home.
For McConaughey, the project marks a return to the big screen after nearly seven years away from theatrical releases. His 2025 Apple TV+ film The Lost Bus revisited the 2018 Camp Fire in Northern California, but his last movie in theaters was Guy Ritchie’s 2019 crime drama The Gentlemen, where he played a fictional pot mogul. The Rivals of Amziah King suggests a different kind of comeback: not glossy, not obvious, and anchored in the kind of regional, oddball Americana McConaughey has long had a knack for inhabiting.
