Anthony and Joe Russo, fresh off their monumental success with Marvel’s Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019), were recruited by Netflix, signing on to direct The Gray Man (2022) for the streaming service in 2020. The film was announced as Netflix’s most expensive production to date, starring Ryan Gosling, Chris Evans, and Ana de Armas, with a budget of $200 million that rivaled budgets for theatrical releases such as Marvel's Black Panther (2018) and Universal’s Jurassic World Rebirth (2025).

     For popular action Hollywood blockbusters, the narrative time between action set pieces, which allows storyline beats to develop, is one of the key distinctions that attracts viewers to movie theaters and sustains audience engagement. This foundation of repeated set pieces appears in franchise blockbusters such as Mission: Impossible and The Fast and the Furious. In Mission Impossible: Fallout (2018), as in previous installments in the series, Ethan Hunt’s crew is shown in sequences of planning, investigation, and character development that bridge the temporal gap, giving them narrative heft. As a contemporary Hollywood blockbuster, MI: Fallout, in comparison to The Gray Man, is a deliberately constructed spectacle that balances narrative stakes, emotion, and action set pieces to critical and commercial success.

     I will focus on the formal logics of The Gray Man that exemplify the streaming blockbuster: its pacing, stylistic direction, and story elements. As David Bordwell demonstrates in The Way Hollywood Tells It, the intensified continuity approach has become a consistent part of Hollywood form, particularly with blockbusters, as he says, “four strategies of camerawork and editing seem central to the new style: rapid editing, bipolar extremes of lens lengths, reliance on close shots, and wide-ranging camera movements.”^[1] These strategies, particularly the rapid editing and camera movements are intensified to extreme lengths in The Gray Man.

        The story opens with truncated exposition, reflecting Robert Rubsam's claim that Netflix action films have “characters explain their motivations and movements, so you can follow without looking up from Instagram.”^[2] Courtland Gentry’s (Ryan Gosling) origins and reasons for working at the CIA are quickly established. Fast-forward eighteen years, Gentry is on a mission for the CIA in Bangkok and refuses orders because a child’s life is at risk, presenting his moral code to the audience.

     The film’s first action sequence takes place at a nightclub, with kinetic action and an unmotivated, erratic camera movement that moves swiftly and diagonally, prioritizing sensational action and thrills over spatial clarity. Gentry’s target is an ex-CIA agent who warns him of corruption within his department. As we continue to jump between locations across the globe, introducing new supporting characters, the film sacrifices characterization of our lead, Gentry, in favor of spectacle and worldbuilding. After the opening sequences, the film unravels as follows, with the Russo Brothers’ stylistic, all-encompassing city text across the screen for each new location:

19:25 Monaco: Introduced to the villain Lloyd Hansen (Chris Evans)

25:08 We first meet Fitzroy’s daughter Claire

27:00 Gentry plane crash and fight sequence

30:00 Turkey: Gentry hitching a ride

34:00 London - Two Year Flashback: Introduced to Margate Cahill and we learn why Gentry is protecting Claire.

35:01 Hong Kong: Gentry and Claire meet.

40:30 Hong Kong 2: Gentry fends off intruders in Claire’s house

41:50 Vienna - Present Day: Introduced to new character Laszlo Sosa

48:07 Berlin: Dani (Ana De Armas) and Denny (Rege-Jean Page) interview scene

53:00 Vienna: Gentry and Lloyd fight - first in-person encounter.

This mapping demonstrates a compressed narrative rhythm, where rapid spatial and temporal shifts occur in short intervals, reflecting a streaming logic that provides immediate thrills and repetitive narrative grounding over sustained build-up and tension. This also illustrates Bordwell's claim that “a narrative requires not just events in time but also change,” at an accelerated rate aligned with streaming sensibilities.^[3] The multitude of locations and character introductions overwhelms viewer recognition, reinforcing the film's rapid pacing and franchise-logic approach. Twenty-five minutes into the film, the narrative stakes are firmly established; Gentry must evade Hansen’s hunt, work against a corrupt CIA, and save Claire.

     After the Vienna encounter, starting at halfway through the film at 1:06:36, an extensive action sequence filled with gunfire begins in Prague and escalates into a car chase throughout the city. After lasting until 1:18:05, we experience a moment of reprieve with dialogue. Yet, the pace quickly jumps at 1:20:00, where the character Lone Wolf, played by Tamil film star Dhanush, is introduced with a fight sequence, ending at 1:24:00. Six minutes later, at 1:30:13, the final action sequence begins, taking us into the film’s conclusion.

     In the film’s climactic conclusion, a playful tone mixes with the final barbaric fight scene between Gentry and Lloyd, where Fitzroy’s daughter is in tears, crying and yelling, then does a 180 and goes “kick his ass” to Gentry about Lloyd. Various characters and decisions point towards franchise building, such as Dani’s threat to Denny: “If anything ever happens to Claire Fitzroy, deals off I’ll come for you,” and how the Lone Wolf dismisses himself from the violence and Lloyd’s team, claiming they are not honorable people. Rubsam’s explanation of Netflix action films “swaddling the action in so much downtime” is revealing when combined with the compressed pacing, showing how uneven bursts of action spectacle are separated by dialogue that rarely moves the storyline forward and is more concerned with reiterating narrative stakes for inattentive audiences paying attention to other devices.

     The Gray Man will stay exclusively with Netflix, along with the film rights to the IP. As Amanda Lotz describes the streaming service recommendation system: “the logic behind the recommendation is not to amass an audience for a particular title but to satisfy individuals based on known patterns of viewing.”^[4] This approach contrasts with the logic of Hollywood theatrical blockbusters, which need a mass following; instead, Netflix focuses on keeping subscribers on its platform, ready for future content. The Gray Man was released in about 450 theaters, not nearly the 4,000 that a typical big-budget blockbuster would appear in on its opening weekend.

     The limited theatrical release of The Gray Man outside large-chain theaters focused on platform viewership, using the release to draw attention to the film's platform release a week later. Since Netflix’s primary logic is to serve many niche interests and to gain and retain subscribers, its blockbuster texts like The Gray Man become its “least consequential” strategy.^[5] Because of Netflix’s content priorities and business model, The Gray Man’s status as a streaming blockbuster is a recycled, replaceable text in the growing Netflix catalog. Streaming blockbusters are not bound by the traditional financial, critical, and audience factors that shape theatrical blockbusters and instead rely on the SVOD model, where the narrative samples and reconfigures blockbuster strategies for Netflix’s broader business model.