During last year’s festival season, I thought Hit Man and The Killer were the same movie. For the life of me, I couldn’t hold in my head the notion that there could be two buzzy movies from American auteurs putting the hit-man archetype under a magnifying glass. When people mentioned Hit Man, I pictured Michael Fassbender, scowling.
This spring, I kept getting Hit Man mixed up with The Fall Guy: another verb + “dude†synonym = two-syllable-action-movie phrase with a light touch and rom-com elements. I just thought they were the same movie, that maybe Hit Man was an old working title, that it had come out already. I assumed Emily Blunt was the female lead in both.
These mix-ups, I have since learned, are a symptom of one of the grossest miscarriages of marketing and distribution justice in Hollywood history. To see Hit Man, on the big screen, anyway, is to love Hit Man. The thing plays like gangbusters in a room. It’s a showcase for the full range of movie star (and co-writer) Glen Powell’s charisma, from screwball to sex symbol. It’s an easy, breezy crowd-pleaser. Partially based on a true story, Hit Man is about a dweeby philosophy professor who impersonates small-time hired assassins for police sting operations, undergoing a personal transformation and getting in too deep in the process. It’s got firecracker chemistry between Powell and Adria Arjona, and it’s a return to form for director Richard Linklater. So why is Netflix doing the absolute least by dumping Hit Man in a paltry two-week exclusive cinematic window before it hits streaming? Why didn’t it go harder on the marketing? Why did I walk into the Paris Theater last week still thinking this was an action movie, when it’s almost entirely talky and sweet?
Hit Man was the biggest purchase at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival when Netflix picked it up for $20 million, following an extremely warm reception. It was announced that the movie would play in “select theaters†on May 24 before getting shunted straight to streaming on June 7. In the months leading up to its release, I personally didn’t see any trailers for it play before other movies in theaters. I didn’t catch any preroll ads for it on YouTube or TikTok, or spy any kind of subway marketing campaign, even though the concept — Powell in a series of costumed personas, like the Master of Disguise with a mewing jawline — is ripe for a viral visual campaign. It was only in the week before the film’s release that I stumbled upon some incredible, albeit small-scale, ads for the film. On May 24, Vulture movie critic Alison Willmore snapped a picture of an airplane flying over Rockaway Beach with a fake ad for the services of Powell’s doofy character, Gary Johnson, saying: “WRONGED? Sweet Gary (717-4-HITMAN).†Totally out of context, Willmore said her fellow beachgoers were “baffled by this ad.â€
On Memorial Day, the Americana at Brand Memes Twitter account (an excellent, albeit hyperspecific, Glendale-centric follow) posted photos of clever, playful Hit Man billboards alongside the cheesy accident-attorney ads they’re spoofing.
These are great. They’re totally fitting in the tone of Powell’s performance. But they also give no mention to the film’s theatrical release, only advertising that it will be on Netflix June 7. Googling how to see Hit Man in theaters, it was hard to find a definitive list of cinemas even playing it. You have to search city by city on Fandango or IMDb, and even then, the options are limited. According to Matthew Belloni’s Puck newsletter, Hit Man is only playing in 44 theaters across America, which is the sort of extremely limited release you’d expect for some sort of obscure art film, not a viably mass-appeal, commercial comedy starring Powell, hot on the heels of the inferior Anyone But You, which did over $200 million in global box office. That sunny rom-com did numbers off of Powell’s movie-star appeal, and I think Hit Man totally could have piggybacked off that. Instead, only a small number of moviegoers will be able to enjoy it in a crowd, while everyone else will just pay divided attention to it on Netflix, where it runs the risk of blending in with all of the other lite straight-to-streaming Netflix original rom-coms (the pinnacle of the middling form, for what it’s worth, also starred Powell).
So allow me to do some unpaid marketing to fill the gap and say: Go see Hit Man in theaters while you can! Bring a date! Spring for a large popcorn! I know going to the movies is expensive, but so is food delivery, and lots of people seem keen on doing that. One of these indulgences helps keep third spaces alive, and the other helps hurry their demise. Hit Man tells us that people can change into the people they want to be. Let’s all change into the sorts of people who go to see silly little rom-coms in theaters and laugh in a room with other people and ogle Glen Powell’s bod. Do it for the movies. Do it for the cute capybara-man.