Netflix has announced that they will be bringing Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans to their streaming service with the release of "The Gray Man". The film will be directed and produced by Joe & Anthony Russo.
The film will be an action/thriller, pitting former CIA assassins Gentry (Gosling) and Lloyd Hansen (Evans) against each other in a global adventure. It will be a large budgeted film with a total of around $200 million.
"The movie is a real mano a mano between those two great actors who represent two different versions of the CIA, in what it can be, and what it can do. For those who were fans of Captain America: Winter Soldier, this is us moving into that territory in more of a real-world setting. That's what this movie really means for us," Anthony Russo told Deadline.
Joe Russo added, "The intention is for it to be competitive with any theatrical, and the ability to do with Gosling and Evans is a dream for us. The idea is to create a franchise and build out a whole universe, with Ryan at the center of it. We have all committed to the first movie, and that's got to be great to get us to the second movie. These are master assassins, and Gosling's characters get burned by the CIA, and Evans' character has to hunt him down. We have a great working relationship with Netflix, and we go back almost 20 years with Scott Stuber. We formed AGBO to be an agnostic storytelling company, where we figure out the best platform. We think Netflix is the perfect place for this film."
Not only are the Russo brothers developing this film for Netflix, but they are also adapting the novel "Exit West" with Michelle and Barack Obama's Higher Ground Productions.
"We hope to get that into production by late fall or early spring, COVID dependent. It's based on a tremendous book, a modern-day fable that deals with magical realism and telling the quintessential Middle Eastern refugee story." Added Anthony Russo: "There is this element of magical realism to how the experience of being a refugee ends up playing out," Joe Russo said.
