Every entertainment journalist under the sun has, at this point, indulged in the oh-so-clever word play that Richard Linklater and Glen Powell’s new movie for Netflix, Hit Man, is, well, a hit, man.
Yet according to Linklater in a recent Zoom interview with Decider, none of Hollywood’s big studios saw it that way when Linklater and Powell went out on the town to pitch their film. Directed by Linklater, who co-wrote the script with Powell, the movie is based on a 2001 Texas Monthly article of the same name by Skip Hollandsworth, which details the life of Gary Johnson (played by Powell in the film), an undercover cop who posed as a fake hit man to help convict criminals in murder-for-hire cases. Linklater and Powell took the liberty of moving well beyond the facts, imagining what might happen if one of Gary fell into a romance with one of his clients (Adria Arjona), while he was pretending to be a hit man.
It’s a fun, playful, fast-paced comedy that still comes with that signature, Linklater-esque, esoteric philosophizing. And it stars one of Hollywood’s hottest leading men of the moment. What studio wouldn’t want that?
“None of them!” Linklater cheerfully replied, when I asked him that very question over Zoom during a press junket on Monday evening.
When pressed why he thought that was, Linklater responded, “I don’t know. Everybody’s scared.[The movie] was not one thing. It’s not a hit man movie.”
That said, he does recall “one conversation, they wanted it to be like a ‘real hit man movie.’ I was like, ‘No, the whole point is, it’s a fake hit man.’ People feel really comfortable with something they’ve seen before. This was a mash-up of things that they hadn’t seen.” He added that Powell’s star-power wasn’t quite what it was today, when they were pitching the film.”I think if it was today, with Glen having been in a few more movies that did well, maybe it’d be different.”
And yet, the director said, even after the movie was finished and premiered at Venice International Film Festival last fall to glowing reviews, Linklater still had trouble selling his film. “That’s the more telling thing about our industry, probably,” he said. “As a finished film, showing it to very appreciative audiences, and a nice critical response—they still didn’t want it! That’s a studio issue that I can’t speak to.”
In the end, Netflix acquired Hit Man in an estimated $20 million deal out of Toronto Film Festival, a few weeks after the premiere in Venice. Netflix agreed to a two-week theatrical release before the movie’s streaming release tomorrow, June 7.
“Every movie is hard to get going,” Linklater concluded. “Studios, by and large, aren’t looking for adult dramas, or even comedies, so much anymore. We know what world we’re living in. They’ve changed quite a bit. So I don’t know. We were lucky to get it made at all.”
Hit Man will begin streaming on Netflix on June 7.