As expected, buddy sequel Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard is on track to top the domestic box office this weekend, although a three-day haul of $10 million and $15 million in total since the movie’s Wednesday debut will see it lagging well behind the first installment.
Of course, the Coronavirus pandemic is largely responsible for such a hefty drop, with the theatrical industry still struggling to maintain any level of consistency in terms of big numbers, but the tepid reviews may have also been a factor. Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard is perfectly fine for what it is, but it doesn’t bring anything new to the table that fans of the last one, or the action genre in general, haven’t seen before and done much better.
In any case, director Patrick Hughes has revealed in a recent interview that Ryan Reynolds was surprisingly okay with everything that would befall his exiled protection agent Michael Bryce in the follow-up, and there are certainly a lot of bad things that happen to him throughout the course of the running time.
“I literally wrote a list of everything I wanted to do. I wanted to get him run over by a car, shot, stabbed, drugged, drowned. Literally everything you could think of, we wrote a list. And I remember, I texted it to Ryan, and I was like, ‘Dude, this is everything I’m gonna do to you’, and he was like, ‘Oh, that’s great. Thank you’.”
What Hughes fails to mention is that Reynolds actually gets hit by a car on more than one occasion, so if anything, he was underselling things a little bit when he was outlining the broad strokes of the screenplay. The Deadpool star is more than game for the stunts, though, and there’s plenty of CGI assistance to get him through the more dangerous scenes, so at the end of the day, there wasn’t too much for him to worry about. Now the only real question is how the creative team raises the stakes whenever a potential third installment arrives, which is looking very likely at this stage.
Published: Jun 20, 2021 11:54 am