As of last June, the new heist film Red Notice was moving along quite nicely in the casting department. The project may have started by looking like Gal Gadot's big follow-up to Wonder Woman 1984, but about a month after that it was revealed that the movie would serve to be a reunion between the actress and Fast & Furious franchise co-star Dwayne Johnson.
Now more than a year has passed since those updates, and we have two big pieces of news to share. The first is that the ensemble is getting even better, as Ryan Reynolds has signed on to the movie. The second bit of news is that Red Notice is going from being a Universal Pictures project to being a Netflix movie.
These details come courtesy of The Wrap, which notes that the film has had a bit of trouble getting to where it needs to be in the development process. Director Rawson Marshall Thurber, who previously worked with Dwayne Johnson on Central Intelligence and Skyscraper, is attached to make Red Notice, and has been for a while, but plans that were originally established to get cameras rolling in the spring fell through for unexplained reasons.
Universal initially thought of the project as a summer tentpole, setting it up for a June 2020 release, and then it was going to play Thanksgiving of next year following its delay. Now that it's in Netflix's hands, we have no idea when we will actually get to see the finished product, but apparently production is being planned for the early months of next year.
Red Notice has been described as an action-comedy, and while we know that it's set to be a globe-trotting heist adventure, little else is known about the narrative.
The film will be the first time that Ryan Reynolds is in a film with Dwayne Johnson, and while the same can't be said about his relationship with Gal Gadot, at the very least this time around they may actually get to share the screen together (they both co-starred in Ariel Vromen's 2016 thriller Criminal, but were featured in different parts of the production).
The project is one of many that Reynolds currently has in development, even having completed production on Michael Bay's 6 Underground and the sequel The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard. Most recently he's been working on Shawn Levy's video game-inspired Free Guy, and we all have big expectations for the return of Deadpool to the big screen - this time as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
With at least five full months before the start of production, Red Notice has plenty of time to add even more incredibly awesome starts to its ensemble, but for now it's off to a pretty damn good start with Dwayne Johnson, Gal Gadot, and Ryan Reynolds. Hopefully we'll hear more updates about the project soon, and while Netflix generally doesn't give away details about release dates until movies and shows are almost upon us, hopefully we'll eventually get a clearer picture of what's going on behind the scenes.
