Ryan Reynolds Time-Travel Film Shifts to Netflix

Ryan Reynolds is headed back to Netflix for his next feature film, which will reunite him with his Free Guy director Shawn Levy. The Hollywood Reporter brings word that Reynolds and Levy’s new time travel feature film, previously titled titled Our Name is Adam, which has moved from Paramount Pictures to Netflix. Skydance has been developing the project for some time and are keen to get in on the success that Netflix has found in recent days with original movies like The Old Guard and Extraction, which are on track to be their most viewed originals of all time according to the streamer.

In the film Reynolds will star as a man that travels back in time to assist his 13-year-old self but ends up running into his dead father who happens to be the same age as the version of him from the present. The studio is apparently gearing up to shoot the film in November in Vancouver despite the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, though film and television productions in Canada have been able to restart in recent weeks.

Jonathan Tropper (This Is Where I Leave You) write the Skydance version of the film which has been in the works at Paramount since 2012 with previous drafts written by T.S. Nowlin and Mark Levin & Jennifer Flackett. At one point the film had Tom Cruise attached to star, but the actor eventually got to appear in a time travel movie of his own of course in 2014’s Edge of Tomorrow.

Reynolds and Levy’s new film Free Guy was originally set to debut earlier this month but was delayed until December 11 due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The film will take the “video game movie” and turn it on its head, by following a protagonist (Reynolds) who is a NPC, or “Non-Player Character,” in a video game. The synopsis for the film simply reads: A bank teller discovers that he’s actually an NPC inside a brutal, open world video game.

Reynolds compared his excitement for the movie to the release of the first Deadpool film.

“I haven’t been this fully immersed, engaged and pumped [about] something since Deadpool,” Reynolds said, “It spoke to the moment in some way.”

He is joined in the film by Jodie Comer (Killing Eve), Joe Keery (Sranger Things), Lil Rel Howery (Get Out), with Taika Waititi (Thor: Ragnarok, Jojo Rabbit) and Channing Tatum (Kingsman 2).