With ‘The Gray Man,’ Avengers Masterminds The Russo Brothers Build A New Franchise For Netflix

On Friday, after a brief week in theatrical release, the most expensive film in Netflix history will arrive on the streaming service, courtesy of two brothers who together shepherded four Disney Marvel movies to more than $6 billion in grosses during far longer stays in theaters.

But that short stay in theaters for The Gray Man is just fine by Netflix, which is hoping the Russo Bros. $200 million feature will become its next franchise tentpole, attracting tens of millions of viewers worldwide and keeping customers around and paying for yet another month of the service.

It arrives close behind massively successful new seasons of Stranger Things and The Umbrella Academy. But The Gray Man also represents where Netflix executives said they want to take their programming in the future, with bigger swings on fewer, more high-profile projects.

“This is an enormous, big-budget action film that normally people would have to go out and spend an enormous amount of money to go see,” Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos said during Tuesday’s quarterly earnings call. “And they’re gonna be premiering it on Netflix.”

The company is clearly hoping fan-friendly blockbusters like The Gray Man, from a pair of writer/director/producers who know how to deliver a big film, will help it reverse two quarters of declines in its subscriber base, the first such drops in more than a decade.

To counter a widespread perception that Netflix makes a lot of shows, but not enough good ones, Sarandos pointed to The Gray Man, and to the 35 Netflix originals that received Emmy nominations this month. With competition ratcheting upward from other streaming services (and videogames, and going to back to offices, and non-streaming social-video giants such as TikTok and YouTube), Netflix will need projects like The Gray Man to keep ‘em coming back.

Sarandos called The Gray Man “an unbelievable proof point of what kind of films this team can put out. This is kind of back to back to back where I think Grey Man will join (previous Netflix action hits) Red Notice, and The Adam Project, and Don’t Look Up as among the most popular movies of the year, not just on Netflix, but period.”

Joe and Anthony Russo certainly know a lot about blockbusters. After more than a dozen years producing and co-directing mostly TV shows, including many episodes of the much-loved comedies Community and Arrested Development (the latter of which netted the brothers an Emmy for directing), they got a big break with Disney, which handed them the keys to its mighty Marvel Avengers franchise.

The brothers returned the trust in buckets, going on one of the most lucrative runs in Hollywood history. Over four films – Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War, and Avengers: Endgame – the brothers’ projects grossed a combined $6.7 billion in theaters.

Then it was time to do something different. The Russos launched their production and development company AGBO (from an old name the brothers used early in their careers), in concert with Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, writers on their Avengers projects and The Gray Man. With AGBO, they began not only making their own projects but helping up-and-coming talent succeed too.

It’s something of a pay-it-forward impulse for the two, they told me in a recent interview, given the nurturing their careers had received from Hollywood iconoclast Steven Soderbergh.

In turn, they and AGBO have backed directors such as The Daniels (co-directors of this year’s hit indie release Everything Everywhere All At Once, which the Russos produced), or Sam Hargrave, who directed Netflix’s 2020 Chris Hemsworth hit action feature Extraction and for which the brothers were writer/producers.

“We’re compelled by what’s next,” Joe Russo said. “And we’re compelled by assisting people like The Daniels and discovering what is next, and people who have a penchant for experimentation and understanding the technology. Netflix is an incredible distribution platform where 100 million viewers watched Extraction. That’s the equivalent of about $2 billion of (theatrical) box office. That’s dramatic and significant, and we see them as a really compelling, forward-thinking distributor of storytelling moving forward.”

The brothers have also embraced the very different approach Netflix takes to overseeing its dozens of productions as they’re being created around the world.

“They think more like a tech company than they do a studio that is sort of ensconced in like, ‘Holy shit, if we give the Russos $200 million to make a movie, we better make sure that this thing gets delivered,’” Joe Russo said. “‘So we have to be all over them, probably to the detriment of the quality of the film, because we’re so nervous and scared that we might get fired, if this doesn’t work.’ They don’t have that attitude.”

The Gray Man is by all accounts the most expensive project ever at Netflix, but its $200 million comes with caveats because of the non-Hollywood way Netflix makes large upfront payments to its top talent, rather than so-called “backend points” that aren’t part of the initial production costs.

“It’s in the ballpark of ($200 million),” Joe Russo said. “Netflix obviously is different than other studios, because they have buyouts that go against the budget. And so you know, when you say $200 million at Netflix, that’s different than $200 million, say, at Disney.”

But make no mistake. This is a very big film, by Hollywood’s or anyone else’s standards. It features a loaded cast led by Ryan Gosling, Chris Evans and Ana de Armas, and is based on a best-selling series of books by Mark Greaney.

For their part, Joe Russo said the brothers had “a blast” making the film, and changed little in the process to accommodate Netflix.

“Netflix, frankly, doesn’t ask anything of you, other than to do your job and do it well,” Russo said. “They’re easier than any studio we’ve ever worked with, and with respect to our artists and the freedom to make the story that you want to make. They have an immense amount of capital deployed to make content. They make a lot of it, so much of it that (the company is) like ‘Good luck, we’ll see you at the end of it. Let us know if you need any help.’ It’s a very refreshing way to approach storytelling and making a movie as an artist.”

The film is a cracking piece of work, zipping from Bangkok to Prague, Vienna to Virginia, rather gleefully destroying cars, planes, trains and a few neighborhoods. A vast C-5 cargo plane slowly disintegrates in mid-air in an early set piece while a brawl goes on inside.

It is sardonic, and dark, and fast-moving, and sends a wink and a nod to the OG himself, James Bond, while asserting the new film is very much not a retread of that six-decade-old franchise.

In sensibility, the film works some of the same territory as Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne series, which were translated by Doug Limon and others into a series of four hit movies. As with Bourne’s Matt Damon, Gosling plays an off-the-books assassin trying to avoid getting killed by his own blandly bureaucratic bosses.

For franchise building, you have multiple tiers of terrible people, while the briefly mentioned puppet master behind them all gets only enough mention to tuck away for the inevitable sequel.

Certainly, the film arrives at a useful time for Netflix as it tries to get back on its feet after a rugged first half of 202. The company sharply pivoted after April’s poorly received earnings report, laying off more than 600 employees, leasing back some office space, killing some projects, and announcing plans for an ad-supported tier.

Despite all that, Netflix executives have been telling nervous Hollywood production companies, talent, and agents that it has plenty of money to do more projects such as The Gray Man. Multiple executives confirmed on Tuesday’s call that the company content-spending plans will be “in the zip code” of $17 billion this year and each of the next couple of years.

That’s roughly double what either Apple TV+ or Amazon Prime Video have committed. And unlike traditional media companies such as Disney or NBCUniversal, Netflix isn’t spending on sports rights or programming destined for any legacy film, broadcast and cable operations.

Some of Netflix’s largess will again flow to the Russos for another big project, the recently announced The Electric State, starring Chris Pratt and Stranger Things star Millie Bobby Brown, based on another book adaptation.

For all the love the brothers’ project have gotten from theater goers, streaming works too for their storytelling needs. They said they’re not missing the grind of a traditional theatrical release and marketing campaign.

“We’re agnostic,” Joe Russo said. “We don’t care. Our intention as storytellers is to reach as wide an audience as possible. We love movies. We grew up on movies. We were in the theaters in the ‘70s discovering the auteurs while it was happening. We came out of that generation. However, we are not reverential about it because everything has its time and then has to transition to the next generation. It is not our right or responsibility to define what future artists should or should not be able to do and what they should consider art or not consider art.”

More important is Netflix’s focus on getting the film to 220 million subscribers in nearly 200 countries around the world.

“Ultimately, …what we care about is what was the reach of the story?” Joe Russo said. “Who did it get to? Frankly, in a lot of ways you’re getting a broader audience through something like Netflix, because going to the movies is expensive, it’s somewhat of an elitist experience. You go to other parts of the world, you go (to a movie) once in your life, and that’s a very significant experience for you. You can get Netflix for $10 or $14, and watch 40 stories in a month versus going to the movies and getting one story once. I think that’s important.”

Also attractive to the brothers was the potential to build a new franchise they would control, which was never going to be possible with an established juggernaut such as Disney’s ever-proliferating Marvel Cinematic Universe. But working in the MCU helped them think about how to construct a broader narrative universe that fans can dive into for years to come, Netflix willing.

“We tried to include characters within this film that you want to know more about in other formats, whether it be other films or series or whatever it may be,” Anthony Russo said. “So we absolutely approached this as the sort of tip of the iceberg of a narrative universe. Now whether we actually get to make that universe, we’ll see. It certainly depends on how this movie is received by audiences. But as creatives we approached it that way.”

The Russos noted that all the Netflix changes are really about the company getting ready for the next phase of the Streaming Wars. And they’re happy to take AGBO’s projects along for the ride.

“I think they’re just deploying like phase two of their plan as a company, which is to get into gaming and there’s rumors that they’re gonna expand theatrical windows to take advantage of theatrical and digital distribution,” Joe Russo said. “They’re just looking at the entire business model, which just…seems to be shifting on a monthly basis.”