On a base level, Joe and Anthony Russo’s The Gray Man was nothing but an unqualified success, but that doesn’t really tell the entire story.
Sure, it ended up as one of Netflix’s most-watched original movies ever and ended up giving rise to an entire shared universe that already has a direct sequel and a spin-off in the works, but it was nowhere near worth the $200 million investment. Apart from Chris Evans’ scenery-chewing villain, there’s barely any entertainment to be found, and it felt as though the entire film was written by an AI program inputted with the commands to script the most banal and generic globetrotting spy thriller possible.
Audiences gave it a pass, to be fair, but when you’ve got that amount of money to play with and a top-tier cast luxuriating in the freedom of headlining a blockbuster safe from box office disaster when it’ll never see the inside of a theater, bigger swings needed to be taken. Hopefully we’ll get that second time around, with the Avengers: Endgame directors offering a status update on the second installment to Collider.
“We’re in the middle of it right now. We’re in the middle of working on The Gray Man 2 script, so, again, everything is about the story. We are hard at work, sleeves rolled up, and more to come soon.”
Anyone that’s seen The Gray Man should get a laugh out of hearing that “it’s all about the story,” which definitely wasn’t the first film’s strongest suit by any means. There’s still plenty of potential in the premise, though, it just needs to be maximized to the fullest.
