“Both of you are wanted dead by the clients.” The first official trailer for the action comedy The Man From Toronto, which was originally a Sony / Columbia Pictures studio film, has been released on Netflix. They sold it to Netflix, who will release it on Netflix instead of in cinemas across the country. This will be available on Netflix at the end of the month. After a blundering sales consultant and the world’s deadliest assassin — known only as “The Man from Toronto” — get mixed up at an Airbnb rental, a case of mistaken identity unfolds.
Patrick Hughes has specialised in making films about violent characters banding together — willingly or not — to safeguard their identities or fight against even more imposing individuals during the course of his developing career. Hughes has spent the last decade focusing on films about unstable people using their wits and life-ending skills to protect themselves or maybe even other people in irreverent and often indelicate ways, with The Expendables 3 and The Hitman’s Bodyguard films in particular, including last year’s The Hitman’s Bodyguard’s Wife.
And with Netflix’s The Man From Toronto, another mismatched frenemies action-comedy in the manner of Hughes’ last two films, Kevin Hart and Woody Harrelson are mistaken for the same assassin, resulting in vicious, hilarious repercussions. The streaming movie’s trailer has given us our first official glimpse at the new action blockbuster.
Hart plays a bumbling sales consultant who is mistaken for the world’s most lethal assassin – a killer known simply as “The Man from Toronto,” as this trailer illustrates. Forced to assume the role of this extremely dangerous killing machine, Hart is soon joined by the real Man from Toronto, played by Woody Harrelson, and the two unlikely characters find themselves in a very violent and (hopefully) quite amusing turn of events together. As we saw with Samuel L., this is unquestionably true.
Hughes enjoys combining two actors to see if sparks ignite, and it’s easy to anticipate the bizarre antics that will ensue between Harrelson and Hart even before we received our first official look at this Sony-turned-Netflix-distributed action romp.
Though Sony had planned to release The Man from Toronto in theatres on August 12th, the action comedy was sold to Netflix earlier this year, resulting in an earlier release date. The studio has previously sold animated family films like The Mitchells vs. the Machines, Vivo, and Wish Dragon to the streaming service, as well as forming a new arrangement with the firm last year that will see some of their newest films hit the site immediately after their theatrical runs. With that in mind, the Netflix deal shouldn’t be interpreted as a frightening lack of faith in this new project, but we won’t have to wait long to see it for ourselves.
