Hit Man director Richard Linklater: Grown-up films ‘out of fashion’ in Hollywood

While stories centred around couples or even throuples have made a comeback in cinema – Kristen Stewart in bodybuilding thriller Love Lies Bleeding, and Zendaya, starring in tennis drama Challengers – Hollywood has had an anguished start to its mainstream summer blockbuster season.

Furiosa, George Miller’s lavish sequel to Mad Max: Fury Road underperformed to reach a box office of $144m (£97m).

The Fall Guy, a big-budget romcom about a stuntman, starring Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, was also judged a flop after making $157m (£122m)

Hopes of success are now pinned on releases such as Marvel’s Deadpool & Wolverine or, later this year, Ridley Scott’s sequel to Gladiator with Paul Mescal.

“You don’t get fired for doing a sequel or an origin story, something that already exists,” Linklater comments, when asked whether studios fear risk-taking for commercial reasons.

“You don’t get in trouble for what’s obvious and commercial. What changed is that films got greenlit by the marketing department and then it’s become really safe choices.

“I think of Hit Man as a movie to have fun with, there should always be room for some sexy couple movies, these are standards in cinema of what people want to see quite often,” he adds.

Yet he says of the movie, which he and Glen Powell started writing during the Covid-19 pandemic, that “the industry really didn’t want to make the film initially.”

“It was done very independently, Glen and I wrote it speculatively and we didn’t get paid anything, we just tried to get the film made. We really felt we were onto something, we felt we had written a film noir, a crime film that’s also a screwball comedy about a couple that you’re rooting to be together, but I think they wanted it to be just one thing.

“Among the frustrating conversations we had with studios and people like that was they wanted Ron to be a real hitman, something they’d seen before. Anyway, then we made the film, and it got a wonderful response. Netflix was always passionate about it, but the others kinda weren’t, I think they weren’t sure if they could sell it to an audience.”