Brace yourselves! A massive action collaboration is coming to Netflix next year.
According to a report from Deadline, Ryan Reynolds will star in a film titled Six Underground, to be directed by Michael Bay (yes, that Michael Bay) and written by Deadpool scribes Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese, who also penned Deadpool 2. The movie will release exclusively on Netflix sometime in 2019.
Unsurprisingly — if you’re familiar with anything Michael Bay has ever done — the film is set to be a “high testosterone mission movie” developed by David Ellison’s Skydance Media, which most recently produced Annihilation. Ellison, Dana Goldberg, and Dan Granger will produce the film alongside Bay. Deadline refers to it as an “action franchise,” implying the film may be the first in a series, though no details have been revealed regarding any future installments. Widely-panned Will Smith vehicle Bright, added to the platform in December, marked Netflix’s first franchise, with a sequel due (featuring new writers to replace Max Landis).
Reynolds has garnered praise for his performances and his creative decision-making in both Deadpool and Deadpool 2, but the 41-year-old actor has struggled to produce serious action films worthy of acclaim (see: Green Lantern, R.I.P.D.). Similarly, Bay has a bit of a reputation for expensive, explosion-laden action scenes and not much else, with Transformers movies comprising five of his past seven directorial credits.
Bay has produced a number of horror films in recent years, including the Purge films and the Ouija films, as well as the live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboots. Both Reynolds and Bay are involved in upcoming kid-focused projects; Reynolds will star as the title character in Detective Pikachu, while Bay will executive produce the live-action Dora The Explorer movie. Reynolds recently appeared, costumed, on South Korea’s popular King of Masked Singer, where he sang while disguised as a unicorn. Yep.
Reese and Wernick are a longtime dynamic duo, having previously written the screenplays for Zombieland, G.I. Joe: Retaliation, and Life (in which Reynolds co-starred). They also co-created the short-lived Joe Schmo Show for Spike TV, a prank series which ran for two seasons in the early aughts. Per Deadline, the deal struck between Netflix and Skydance is in the $150 million range.
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