It’s been two years since The Gray Man debuted on Netflix and while plans for a sequel and a spinoff of the Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans starring film was announced soon after release, there have been few updates since. Now, however, directors Joe and Anthony Russo are sharing news about the project, explaining in a recent interview why there has been a long wait for a sequel to the action thriller. As it turns out, everything comes down to deciding where to take the story next.
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“We’re developing concepts we think are the right direction to take the character in and so, we are working on that at the moment,” Joe Russo said in an interview with Gamesradar. “I mean, you’re juggling like 14 things at the same time so you have to apportion your time correctly to each one of them.”
What Is The Gray Man About?
Based on Mark Greaney’s 2009 novel of the same name, The Gray Man centers around CIA Agent “Sierra Six” (Gosling) who is on the run from a sociopathic ex-CIA agent and mercenary Lloyd Hansen (Evans) after the former discovers corrupt secrets about his superior. In addition to Gosling and Evans, the film stars Ana de Armas, Billy Bob Thornton, Jessica Henwick, Rege-Jean Page, Wagner Moura, Julia Butters, Dhanush, and Alfre Woodard. The Russo Brothers both directed and wrote the screenplay.
“We didn’t have to sell Chris on the role; Chris sold us, in a way,” Joe Russo said when the film was released. “We were talking to him as we were wrapping up Infinity War and then Avengers: Endgame about what’s next for him or where he wanted to go in his career, and he said, ‘You know what? I’m comfortable enough in my life and the work I’ve done that I’m just interested in taking risks moving forward, and I just want to play challenging characters.’ So, it seemed obvious to us that the right move here would be to offer Chris the sociopath and not the hero.”
The Russo Brothers Don’t Believe in “Superhero Fatigue”
In the same interview in which they provided the update about The Gray Man sequel, the Russo Brothers also opened up about their opinion on the discourse about “superhero fatigue”, with the filmmakers saying that they don’t think it’s superhero fatigue specifically, but “fatigue in general”.
“I think it’s fatigue in general,” Anthony argued. “The superhero fatigue question was around long before the work we were doing. So, it’s sort of an eternal complaint, like we always used to cite this back in our early days with superhero work. People used to complain about westerns in the same way but they lasted for decades and decades and decades. They were continually reinvented and brought to new heights as they went on.”
“I think it’s a reflection of the current state of everything,” Joe said of Marvel’s recent updates. “It’s difficult right now, it’s an interesting time. I think we’re in a transitional period and people don’t know quite yet how they’re going to receive stories moving forward, or what kinds of stories they’re going to want. “There’s a big generational divide about how you consume media. There’s a generation that’s used to appointment viewing and going to a theater on a certain date to see something, but it’s ageing out. Meanwhile the new generation are ‘I want it now, I want to process it now’, then moving onto the next thing, which they process whilst doing two other things at the same time. You know, it’s a very different moment in time than it’s ever been. And so, I think everyone, including Marvel, is experiencing the same thing, this transition. And I think that really is probably what’s at play more than anything else.”
