Everyone watched Red Notice. It became Netflix’s most-watched movie ever with more than 328 million viewing hours. It was also demonstrably a terrible film. Quantity, however, trumps quality, and Netflix has greenlit another two films in the franchise with the film’s three stars — Dwayne Johnson, Gal Gadot, and Ryan Reynolds — returning. Red Notice 2 and 3 will be filmed back to back with production beginning in 2023.
Things are still in the organizational phase as Netflix tries to pull together the busy schedules of three of the world’s biggest stars to shoot two movies at one time. However, Rawson Marshall Thurber, who wrote and directed the first film, is expected to return to write and direct Red Notice 2 and 3 as well. He’s begun writing the screenplays already, which are said to bring back the three leads from the first film and then flesh out some more characters, apparently in an Ocean’s Eleven-ish way. Aside from that, and the fact that wacky heists that don’t make sense will be involved, there isn’t much known about how these films will play out.
The original film concluded with the three main characters teaming up for a new heist (after an obvious twist) and was clearly setting up more movies. That’s what Netflix wanted from the film when it paid more than $200 million for its production, making it the most expensive movie ever for the streamer at the time. It obviously paid off as the franchise was a big winner, but the movie itself was mostly panned by critics and fans. That raises the question of if the returns on the sequels will be worth the explosive amount of money that filming two high-budget movies in a row will cost.
