‘The Gray Man’ Wants to Be Your Next Big Action-Movie Franchise So Badly

The creative team behind ‘Avengers: Endgame’ return with an espionage thriller featuring movie stars, expensive blockbuster mayhem, and a strong sense that you’ve seen all of this before. The creative team behind ‘Avengers: Endgame’ return with an espionage thriller featuring movie stars, expensive blockbuster mayhem, and a strong sense that you’ve seen all of this before.

The wheel has spun and finally landed on Ryan Gosling’s name, and lucky for him, his turn to be a Bourne-again antihero comes via a project with serious pulp-lit pedigree. The Gray Man takes its name, if not its plot, from the first in a series of books by Mark Greaney about a CIA-sponsored killing machine who’s forced to go rogue and, naturally, finds himself in the Agency’s crosshairs. The directors are Anthony and Joe Russo, and the screenwriters are Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, four men who…let’s say they’ve dabbled in making the occasional financially successful event movie. They know their way around a blockbuster, in other words. The budget is rumored to be somewhere around the gross national income of a small country. You can tell the folks at Netflix smell a franchise here — not so much a cash cow as a potential cash stockyard.