Netflix, Still Reeling, Bets Big on ‘The Gray Man’

Anthony and Joe Russo like to go big.

In 2018’s “Avengers: Infinity War,” the directing brothers shocked fans when they erased half the global population and allowed their Marvel superheroes to fail. The next year, they raised the stakes with the three-hour “Avengers: Endgame,” a film that made $2.79 billion at the global box office, the second-highest figure ever to that point.

And now there is “The Gray Man,” a Netflix film that they wrote, directed and produced. The streaming service gave them close to $200 million to trot around the world and have Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans portray shadow employees of the C.I.A. who are trying to kill each other.

“It almost killed us,” Joe Russo said of filming.

One action sequence took a month to produce. It involved large guns, a tram car barreling through Prague’s Old Town quarter and Mr. Gosling fighting off an army of assassins while handcuffed to a stone bench. It’s one of those showstoppers that get audiences cheering. The moment cost roughly $40 million to make.

“It’s a movie within a movie,” Anthony Russo said.

“The Gray Man,” which opened in select theaters this weekend and will be available on Netflix on Friday, is the streaming service’s most expensive film and perhaps its biggest gamble as it tries to create a spy franchise in the mold of James Bond or “Mission Impossible.” Should it work, the Russos have plans for expanding the “Gray Man” universe with additional films and television series, as Disney has done with its Marvel and Star Wars franchises.

But those franchises, while turbocharged by streaming and integral to the ambitions of Disney+, are first and foremost theatrical enterprises. “The Gray Man” is coming out in 450 theaters. That’s a far cry from the 2,000 or so that a typical big-budget release would appear in on its opening weekend. And the film’s nearly simultaneous availability on Netflix ensures that most viewers will watch it on the service. Films that Netflix releases in theaters typically leave them much faster than movies from traditional studios.

“If you’re trying to build a franchise, why would you start it on a streaming service?” asked Anthony Palomba, a professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business who studies media and entertainment trends, specifically how consumers’ habits change.

The film comes at a critical time for Netflix, which will announce its second-quarter earnings on Tuesday. Many in the industry expect the results to be even grimmer than the loss of two million subscribers that the company forecast in April. The company’s first-quarter earnings led to a precipitous drop in its stock price, and it has since laid off hundreds of employees, announced that it will create a less expensive subscription tier featuring commercials and said it plans to crack down on password sharing between friends and family.

Despite the current rough patch, Netflix’s deep pockets and hands-off approach to creative decisions made it the only studio that was able to match the Russos’ ambitions and their quest for autonomy.

“It would have been a dramatically different film,” Joe Russo said, referring to the possibility of making “The Gray Man” at another studio, like Sony, where it was originally set to be produced. The brothers said going elsewhere would have required them to shave off a third of their budget and downgrade the action of the film.

One person with knowledge of the Sony deal said the studio had been willing to pay $70 million to make the movie. Instead, the Russos sold it to Netflix in an agreement that allowed Sony to recoup its development costs and receive a fee for its time producing it. Sony declined to comment.

The movie includes nine significant action sequences, including a midair fight involving emergency flares, fire extinguishers and Mr. Gosling’s grappling with a parachuted enemy as both tumble out of a bombed-out plane, Anthony Russo said.

“Ambition is expensive,” Joe Russo said. “And it’s risky.”

Netflix, even in this humbling moment, can pay more upfront when it isn’t saddled with the costs that accompany much bigger theatrical releases. And for Scott Stuber, Netflix’s head of global film, who greenlighted the “Bourne Identity” franchise when he was at Universal Pictures, movies like “The Gray Man” are what he has been striving to make since he joined the company five years ago.

“We haven’t really been in this genre yet,” Mr. Stuber said in an interview. “If you’re going to do it, you want to deal with filmmakers who over the last decade have created some of the biggest franchises and the biggest action movies in our business.”

The Russos are also producing the sequel to “Extraction” with Chris Hemsworth for Netflix and just announced that Netflix would finance and release their next directing venture, a $200 million sci-fi action film, “The…