By all accounts, Amazon’s in-development festive blockbuster Red One has all the trappings of a cynical cash grab, with the streaming service/multimedia conglomerate precision-engineering a mega budget action blockbuster starring the world’s biggest movie star that’s set to act as the basis for an entire holiday-themed shared universe, one that’ll air during the time of year when the company’s customers are purchasing the highest number of goods.
Skepticism aside, the thought of Dwayne Johnson headlining a broad, crowd-pleasing festive film he’s described as a cross between Miracle on 34th Street and Hobbs & Shaw sounds so bizarre that it’s got all the potential to be fantastic, especially with Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle and The Next Level‘s Jake Kasdan behind the camera.
In an interview with Collider, producer Hiram Garcia teased what we should expect from Red One, which is also a passion project for the Seven Bucks executive, when he was the one who came up with the idea in the first place.
“What I can tell you is that it is a very big Christmas movie. We’ve always wanted to do a Christmas movie, but we didn’t want to do the typical Christmas movies that tend to go a little bit broader, I think, in tone. We had been looking for something that matched, the tone and tenor of DJ and what DJ brings to the table, so was able to come up with a really fun Christmas idea, but in tone it’s much more of a Hobbs & Shaw, more of Guardians of the Galaxy in tone and vibe because you’re dealing with crazy mythological elements, turning a lot of tropes we know about the holidays on their head, but also really big action and globe-trotting.
One of the things that we like about this project is that we can’t find a comp for a Christmas movie that’s ever been made like this or one that matches the tone and scale of what it’s going to be, so that feels exciting for us to do something that hasn’t been done before. As we’re hashing it out with Jake Kasdan and Chris Morgan, we’re just getting more and more excited at how we’re going to turn all this fun mythology that people know so well on its head but in a really cool way that is always going to make the holidays feel even more good and more real.”
Very few actors have remained so popular while playing it as relentlessly safe as Johnson, so while we shouldn’t expect Red One to reinvent the action, comedy or Christmastime wheels by any stretch of the imagination, it could easily go down in the history books as annual favorite if the creative team manages to pull off such a wild concept.