Ryan Gosling And Chris Evans Will Square Off In A Spy Thriller On Netflix Directed By The Russo Brothers

Chris Evans spent Thursday night explaining why he isn’t taking Tim Allen’s job as the voice of Buzz Lightyear on Twitter, but an Evans-involved Friday social media entry was much less confusing news. Captain America is apparently joining up with some other Marvel Cinematic Mainstays, directors Joe and Anthony Russo.

Netflix announced that Evans and Ryan Gosling will join Ana de Armas in a new film directed by the Russos based on a novel called The Gray Man, the debut work from Mark Greaney.

The project actually first made headlines back in July, as Deadline reported the budget for the film is expected to be Netflix’s largest ever: upwards of $200 million to create what’s described as a Bond-like cinematic universe:

Said Joe Russo on the film’s scale: “The intention is for it to be competitive with any theatrical, and the ability to do with 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 gets 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.”

And it seems to be a huge investment in what’s an intriguing source material. Here’s the novel description, per the author’s website:

Court Gentry is known as The Gray Man– a legend in the covert realm, moving silently from job to job, accomplishing the impossible, and then fading away. And he always hits his target. But there are forces more lethal than Gentry in the world. And in their eyes, Gentry has just outlived his usefulness.

Now, he is going to prove that for him, there is no gray area between killing for a living– and killing to stay alive.

Deadline noted that Gosling is expected to play Gentry in the film, though Lloyd Hansen (Evans) will be a former CIA pal hunting down Gentry as the picture spans the globe. The Gray Man is billed as the first novel in the series by author, so this may be another franchise in the works if things go well on Netflix. That’s a lot of world-building for the Russos all goes according to plan.

(Via Netflix & Mark Greaney)