The first trailer for Warner Bros.' shark-based thriller The Meg arrived on our shores last night in terrifying fashion. It's quickly become one of my most anticipated films of the year based on nothing other than deep-sea terror, the strong possibility of seeing Rainn Wilson's character die in spectacular fashion, and the chance that Jason Statham will get to punch a prehistoric shark in the face. This potential blockbuster may make folks afraid to go back into the water again this summer but they should be arriving at the movie theater in droves.

Now Jon Turteltaub could have gone extreme for this take on the world's biggest shark to have ever existed--and there's every chance that the movie will do just that--but the first trailer keeps its title terror surprisingly close to the monsters that existed in reality. Perhaps that's due to the adaptation of Steve Alten's 1997 sci-fi book "Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror", but it's a refreshing bit of scientific accuracy for a movie that doesn't really need to rely on it. Then again, the true horror of megalodon's statistics are terrifying enough to begin with that you really don't need to exaggerate much at all. I took at look at just how closely The Meg's title terror comes to reality; we'll see how much of this holds up when it opens this August 10th.

For a primer, check out Discovery's Shark Week spotlight on Megalodon:

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Using one of the two-person ocean kayaks in the poster, which average about 12 feet long, the megalodon in the poster--and presumably, the movie--comes in at about 78 feet across from fin tip to fin tip, and probably about 120 feet from nose to tail fin. That's roughly twice the size of what the actual megalodon was expected to be, if you take such scientifically available evidence as the fossil record into consideration. The best estimates scientists have is that a specimen of this massive ocean predator would have been roughly 60 feet long; that's still 10 men of above-average height stacked from tip to tail. The official synopsis, however, lists the beast at 75-feet-long, so we'll split the difference here.

What's (super nerdy-style) cool about this movie fish is that it could, conceivably, have been that big. It would have been an outlier for sure, but since the fossil record is incomplete and since size estimates have varied pretty significantly over the decades, it's possible a 75-footer could have existed millions of years ago. Compare that with the largest great white shark ever recorded at 20 feet and you start to get a sense of scale for this monster. Anything over 52 feet long would be a world record, as far as fish are concerned, which is currently held by the Jurassic fishy, Leedsicthys.

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A reconstructed jaw from megalodon fossils puts the mega-mouth of the shark around 9 x 11 feet, easily big enough to swallow this little girl whole, a la Jonah or Pinnochio. This first scene from the trailer, which introduces the terrifying fish, might actually be shortchanging megalodon's massive maw of the beast a bit--a closing shot of The Meg goes to the opposite extreme--but the shark's presumed six-and-a-half-foot jaw span is pretty dang close.

When it comes to the teeth of the "big tooth" shark, each of them would probably max out at about 7 inches, or longer than the length of your hand. One is bad enough, but megalodon likely had about 250 teeth spread over 5 rows. Couple that with an estimated bite force of 182,200 Newtons, or 40,960 pound-force. (Yikes.) Compare that to a boxer's ability to generate 5,000 Newtons with a punch or a martial artist's 9,000-Newtons kick (both of which have a good chance of cracking human bones), and it's plain to see that even the super-human Statham is going to be in for a tough time if he wants to go shark-punching.

As far as speed goes, it's hard to get an angle on just how fast The Meg is moving in this trailer, but the presumed top speed for a shark this size is 11 mph, based on size-to-speed ratios of large modern-day fish. Compare that to your average swimmer at around 3.7 to 4.5 mph (good luck sustaining that, adrenaline or not) and we're likely snack food for the megalodon. Kayakers probably won't fair much better, topping out around 9 mph. The good news for we puny humans is that even our little pontoon boats can putter along at 15mph or much, much more. But should you run out of gas, suffer engine trouble, or just end up in the wrong part of the sea at the wrong time, there's a good chance megalodon will gobble you and your boat up in no time.

Don't cancel your beach plans just yet though. Like the movie itself mentioned, megalodon went extinct roughly 2 million years ago after ruling the prehistoric seas for about 20 million years before that. A pretty good run for the world's largest fish and, thankfully, one that doesn't coincide with that of the meaty morsels known as mankind...at least not until The Meg arrives in theaters to terrify us later this summer.

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Image via Warner Bros.