Red One is an upcoming action-comedy with a staggering cast. Dwayne Johnson, Chris Evans, JK Simmons and Lucy Liu are just some of the names attached, with each of them being recognizable faces dating back decades.
In a different era, a film like Red One would be a guaranteed smash. In 2024, though, this film is going to come and go like it never existed. It's the latest in a long line of films that are so generically pitched and marketed that they seem fake.
Johnson and Evans, in particular, have racked up a lot of these in recent years. In an effort to better understand this phenomenon, we assembled a list of star-studded 2020s films that have so little going for them outside of the cast that you probably thought they were made up using AI.
Red Notice (2021)
Dwayne Johnson is apparently a sucker for films with "red" in the title. Red Notice featured Johnson, Ryan Reynolds and Gal Gadot after each of them had found major success in superhero and action franchises. It was supposed to be the start of a new franchise for Netflix, but the film made no noise whatsoever with fans.
The plotting and the jokes were so rote that the film simply dissolved on impact. It's evident from the trailer that Red Notice coasts exclusively on the big names that are attached. There are two sequels still in development, but we dare you to recall anything about the first film by the time they come out.
The Gray Man (2022)
What a waste. Anthony and Joe Russo proved that they could make excellent action-thrillers with Chris Evans at the helm, and Netflix gave them carte blanche with a $200 million budget. The Gray Man is nothing if not forgettable, though. All the money is evident on the screen, but it has such an unappealing slickness that nothing about the characters or the action scenes take hold.
Evans seems to be having fun as a villain, and Ryan Gosling brings his trademark charisma to the title role, but The Gray Man wound up being a nothing burger when it could have been a throwback to the action blockbusters of the 1990s. Hollywood is obviously out of practice.
Ghosted (2023)
Ghosted was doomed from the moment the poster dropped. The Apple TV romantic comedy had two major stars in Chris Evans and Ana de Armas (who also starred in The Gray Man), but they were posed so generically on the poster that it looked like they were promoting a new Apple watch rather than a piece of art.
The film isn't much better. Evans and de Armas sleep walk through a tired collection of cliches that make its 116 minute runtime feel like it should come with an intermission. Ghosted became the most streamed film debut in Apple TV history, though, which is just dire as hell when you sit and think about it.
The Union (2024)
Anybody heard of this? Is there a soul reading this article who even knew that Oscar nominee Mark Wahlberg and Oscar winner Halle Berry recently starred in an action-comedy? This took research to uncover, but it's worth listing here because Wahlberg and Berry have become regular faces in these fake-real films.
Wahlberg, in particular, has rolled out streaming films like Me Time (2022) and The Family Plan (2023) that somehow disappear from consciousness before they even hit their respective platforms. We're talking about a guy who has been a star since 1997.
Something is wrong with the current model, and until it gets remedied, we're going to have more and more release dissolve on impact. Red One will be released on November 15, if you're have time to kill but don't want to kill it with anything memorable.