Glen Powell might not be a hitman in real life, but he sure knows how to pierce hearts. Actually, I might be the one to consider a career in… hitmanery? Whatever it takes to shoot my shot!

At the Golden Globes, Powell was a serious smoke show, decked out in all black, and looking quite like his transformed character Gary Johnson in Hit Man, a role that earned him a nomination for Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy. While Powell didn’t walk away with the trophy, he actually left the fans a memento that’s going to live on in our minds for a while – behind the scenes looks at his outfit prep.

A true Texan stud

Glen Powell’s most recent Instagram carousel is the stuff dreams are made of. Evidently, it wasn’t enough for this Texan fox to grace the Golden Globes red carpet, or flash his pearly whites every time the camera panned to him. Oh no. Instead, Powell took us even further, giving us a peek into his entire look before the ceremony.

In all-black Armani, Powell served up multiple poses, from casually laying down on the bed in the suit that probably cost more than my yearly rent, to piercing into the camera with a “smize” that would warrant a standing ovation from Tyra Banks herself. His entire outfit was Armani, down to the sleek, black cummerbund that cinched his waist perfectly. 

One of the photos in the carousel also shouted out the man behind the look– the famous Warren Alfie Baker, stylist to the stars. And we owe him a double thank you, because he’s also responsible for adorning Andrew Garfield in that gorgeous green Gucci suit we’ve still not recovered from.

Hollywood’s latest leading man

The road to becoming a leading lad in Hollywood is not an easy one. But Glen Powell definitely makes it look fun. His style and charisma are reminiscent of the 90’s stars, and that’s probably why he’s earned comparisons to fellow Texan-native, Matthew McConaughey.

But make no mistake, Powell’s his own man, and he’s just as versatile as some of the best. Heck, in Hit Man alone, he showed off his range by playing about 10 different characters, and perfectly so, too. Not to mention his hilarious time on Scream Queens, his nonchalant hunk persona in Anyone But You, becoming a brash bully on Top Gun: Maverick, and a heroic meteorologist in Twisters.

These days, Powell is no stranger to being gawked at. At the Golden Globes ceremony, even host Nikki Glaser couldn’t hold back thirsting after the actor. But beyond his good looks and ‘90s charm, Powell is one of the powerhouses keeping the new wave of Hollywood afloat. For years, he has kept on the rise, and is now one of the most in-demand A-list men in the industry. 

If you’re not over seeing Powell on screen (how could you be?), the actor is set to have a pretty thrilling 2025. He is set to morph into the titular role of Chad Powers in the comedy produced by ESPN. He will also lead the dystopian thriller The Running Man, and the black comedy thriller, Huntington.

Hit Man has been one of the most highly-touted films of 2024. The crime-comedy is helmed by Oscar-nominated director Richard Linklater and stars Adria Arjona and Glen Powell, the latter of whom is quickly on his way to becoming the biggest names in Hollywood.

Fans have waited quite some time to see the film. It originally premiered at the Venice International Film Festival in Sept. 2023 and underwent a lengthy waiting process before finally being picked up by Netflix.

It received a limited theatrical window in May, but as with most Netflix releases, it will reach its widest number of viewers at home. This, invariably, begs the question: when is Hit Man coming to the streaming platform? When will we get to see Glen Powell’s titular performance, which has been hailed by many as a star-making turn?

Well, fortunately, the wait is over.

When will ‘Hit Man’ become available to stream on Netflix?

Hit Man will land on the streaming platform on Friday, June 7. This is standard operating procedure for films and most TV shows. According to the help center on the official Netflix website, “Netflix original TV shows and movies are typically released globally at 12:00 a.m. Pacific Time.”

This is a different rollout method than what’s employed in the music industry. While albums typically release at 12:00 a.m. Eastern Time on Fridays, which allows those on the West Coast to hear them on Thursday evening, Netflix uses Pacific Time. This means that West Coast viewers will have to wait until Friday morning to start watching. The same goes for those on the East Coast, who don’t get the new release until 3:00am.

Linklater considers Netflix the best platform for his film

Hit Man is not the first Richard Linklater film to get a Netflix release. The streaming platform was also home to Linklater’s previous effort, Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood (2022), which earned rave reviews from critics.

The director spoke to Radio Times about the decision to have his recent films go to streaming and forego a wide theatrical window, and he noted that it’s merely a way to get the most engagement from viewers:

So on Netflix you have a really good chance of a lot of people ultimately seeing the film… That’s fine by me. And it’s not like we’re not in theaters. That’s what cineastes and all of us kind of live for.

Adria Arjona has been climbing up the Hollywood ladder for years now, but Netflix’s new movie Hit Man might be what finally turns her into a superstar.

Arjona plays Madison Masters in the action rom-com directed by the Before trilogy’s Richard Linklater, and co-written by him and Glen Powell. The character starts as the victim of an abusive husband who wants to hire Powell’s hitman to kill him but soon evolves into a complicated and fascinating femme fatale type of deuteragonist. And Arjona nails every beat.

The film hinges on the leading duo’s chemistry as the hitman (who, unbeknownst to Madison, is working undercover for the police) falls for his client and begins blurring the lines between real and pretend.

An almost perfect critics score on Rotten Tomatoes points towards Hit Man potentially becoming a streaming hit on Netflix when it premieres June 7. With how magnetic Arjona is in it, it could and should cause her career to blow up, but if her face looks familiar, it’s because it is. The Puerto Rican-Guatemalan actress has been hitting the grind since 2012.

Adria Arjona’s most popular movies and television shows

Although Hit Man is arguably Arjona’s biggest movie role yet, the 32-year-old actress’ CV is vast, and it includes some pretty major productions from the last decade — well, some more major than others.

It doesn’t get bigger than Star Wars, and Arjona got to be a pretty important part of one of the franchise’s best offerings of the Disney era, the 2022 series Andor. The actress plays Bix Caleen, Cassian’s ex-girlfriend and trusted ally in the show, and is expected to return for its second season.

Although not comparable to Star Wars in scope, but certainly comparable in the ion of its fans is Good Omens, the Amazon MGM/BBC series created by Neil Gaiman in 2019. In the show’s first season, Arjona played Anathema Device, the descendant of the last true witch in England. On television, the actress was also in 2022’s Irma Vep miniseries, and in Emerald City, an NBC show based on Oz that sadly only lasted for a season, where Arjona played none other than Dorothy Gale.

On the silver screen, Arjona’s portfolio is even more diverse. Before Hit Man, she was perhaps more recognizably cast in Sony/Marvel’s comically bad film Morbius, and in Michael Bay’s 6 Underground alongside Ryan Reynolds.

The actress, who got her start in True Detective in 2015, was also part of the ing cast of smaller films like 2021’s Sweet Girl, 2018’s Life of the Party, and 2019’s Triple Frontier. In 2022, she starred in the Cuban-American remake of Father of the Bride as Sofia Herrera, the titular bride and daughter of Andy García’s titular father.

In the pipeline for Arjona are Zoë Kravitz’ directorial debut Blink Twice and Los Frikis, a movie that caused a sensation at the 2024 Miami Film Festival.

when mid-size budget comedies with a whacky but simple premise used to be great? The type of film you watch on a random afternoon that leaves you feeling satisfied instead of feeling like you’ve just wasted your scarce, precious free time? That’s Hit Man.

Richard Linklater’s latest, starring Glen Powell and Adria Arjona, is pure entertainment backed with an actual thought-through storyline and rich characters, providing fun and stimulation (cerebral and otherwise) in equal measure.

It follows Gary Johnson, a college professor who is hired by the police to pretend to be a hitman in order to catch people wanting to order a hit on their enemies in the act. Gary, who leads a rather uneventful life, latches on to the opportunity to experience some adventure and becomes rapidly proficient at convincing his clients he’s the real deal. When Arjona’s Madison Masters asks him to kill her husband, sparks fly and the two enter a perilous love affair.

If that sounds like a great weekend plan and you’re now wondering if it’s safe to bring your kids along, we’ve got the answers.

What is Hit Man‘s rating?

Currently enjoying a 96% score from 79 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, Hit Man is rated R, which means audiences under the age of 17 must be accompanied by a parent or adult guardian when watching the film.

Hit Man is a lot of fun, but it does contain some violence, both verbal and physical, plenty of sexual content between the fiery romantic duo that is Powell and Arjona, and use of strong language throughout.

The film hits limited theaters Friday, May 24, followed by a Netflix release on June 7.

Glen Powell is on a roll. His new film Hit Man is even hotter and more acclaimed than his box-office sleeper hit with Sydney Sweeney, Anyone but You.

Hit Man, however, is especially near and dear to the actor, since he co-wrote the script alongside director and frequent collaborator Richard Linklater in what was one of his first writing ventures ever. Based on an article published in Texas Monthly back in 2001, the film fictionalizes the life of Gary Johnson, a philosophy professor working part-time as a fake hitman for the police to catch criminals.

Linklater and Powell’s screenplay mixes action thriller with screwball comedy and romance for an impossibly entertaining combination that proves mid-budget, fun, hearty movies are everything the industry needs right now.

How does Hit Man end?

After a slew of very successful meetings and arrests, Gary Johnson slips up for the first time when Madison (Adria Arjona), a beautiful woman, broken and caged by an abusive relationship, tries to hire him (as his hunky, confident hitman persona named Ron) to kill her husband. Believing she doesn’t actually want to see anyone get killed, Gary convinces her to use the money she had reserved for the job to turn her life around instead.

Madison eventually s Gary/Ron again and the two start a high-risk relationship, with her under the impression that he is actually the dangerous hitman he says he is. Later on, after the two run into Madison’s ex-husband, the man tries to hire Gary to kill the pair, unaware he is the boyfriend he had previously met.

When Gary/Ron tells Madison about the meeting, she reassures him that her husband will never kill her himself, only to turn around and kill him herself. Gary/Ron is shocked when he finds out and finally tells her about his double identity, but is pushed into a corner when the police start suspecting Madison.

Meanwhile, the guy who used to do Gary’s job, Jasper (Austin Amelio), and had run into the couple when they were out on a date, starts suspecting his partner despite the latter’s best efforts to put him off their scent. Even after the police ask Gary to try and get a taped confession out of Madison and he successfully gets her to lie to him in a brilliant display of their acting chops, Jasper is still not convinced and decides to pay the woman a visit.

Jasper asks for the dead husband’s life insurance money in exchange for his silence, but Madison drugs his beer, rendering him unconscious. Scared the policeman will wake up and the two will be in even deeper [insert the more vulgar synonym of “excrements” here], Gary, who hadn’t actually killed anyone yet, completes his final transformation into Ron and wraps a plastic bag around Jasper’s head, leading him to slowly suffocate to death.

The equally psychotic couple disposes of the body and stages Jasper’s death as a suicide. Years later, they are living out their unorthodox happily ever after. They now have two children, a boy and a girl, Gary has become an amalgam of his two identities (inside you there are two wolves, etc.), and is still teaching. When their daughter asks them how they met, they embellish the truth, telling her they met at a café and that it was love at first sight (somewhat true), but leaving out all other morally questionable details. Yeah, because that will definitely go down better when she’s 18.

Hit Man has one of those stories you would never have believed were true if the film hadn’t let you know from the jump.

In the action rom-com, Glen Powell plays Gary Johnson, a fake hitman hired by police to catch solicitors in the act. That man really existed, and all the eccentric meetings with eccentric clients often played for laughs in the film really happened.

The one major aspect of Hit Man that co-writers Powell and Richard Linklater (who also directed the film) completely fabricated was the romance between Powell’s Johnson and Adria Arjona’s desperate housewife Madison Masters.

Who was the real Gary Johnson and which aspects of his life carried onto Hit Man?

The real Gary Johnson worked out of Houston and not New Orleans like Powell’s character. He was however raised in Louisiana before he moved to the Texas state capital to pursue an academic career in psychology. When his application for a doctoral program at the University of Houston was rejected, he became an investigator for the district attorney’s office.

Johnson, who like his movie version fostered a fascination for the human psyche, had worked as a military policeman in Vietnam, as an officer in a Louisiana parish sheriff’s deputy, and as an undercover drug addict on the hunt for drug dealers for the Port Arthur police department. What he really wanted, however, was to be a psychology professor, which led him to night university classes until he received a master’s degree in the field.

Like Powell’s fictionalized version, the real Gary Johnson also worked as a college professor, two nights a week. Per the 2001 Texas Monthly article that inspired Linklater and Powell to write Hit Man during the pandemic, “On Mondays he [taught] human sexuality and on Tuesdays, he [taught] general psychology. “

He first became a hitman when the police called the DA’s office to ask for a murder-for-hire specialist, and Gary was picked. Just like in the film, he took to the job instantly, dedicating his time to craft the perfect persona for each “client.”

One particular line in the article written by Skip Hollandsworth seems to have been the catalyst for the Hollywoodian twist that Linklater’s movie brings to the real story. After years of working as a mole for the police, Gary Johnson became so good at his job that the officers in charge of listening to the tapes he would make of his clients no longer recognized him.

‘It got to a point where I would be transcribing a tape of one of his murder-for-hire conversations, and I could not tell it was Gary on the tape,’ says Esmeralda Noyola, a secretary in the DA’s special-crimes division.”

The real Gary never really morphed into one of his characters the way Glen Powell’s version does in the film. But the fascination with that side of the job is easy to understand.

There were also a number of details from Hollandsworth’s article that found their way into Powell and Linklater’s script. Gary’s cats were indeed called Id and Ego, and he did love to tend to his plants, even if there’s no mention of his love of birds in the source material. He loved to read books about and written by Carl Jung, and he did have “All pie is good pie” as a code phrase to meet a client. Like in the film, he was offered a luxury motorboat as payment once, and he did have a teenager attempt to hire him with video games and nickels.

And yes. The falling in love with a client bit was made up. The real Gary Johnson also had trouble forming long-lasting romantic relationships, but he was married and divorced three times, with one of his ex-wives saying he just enjoys his alone time too much. And, although there was one woman whom the real Gary Johnson dissuaded from hiring a hit job on her abusive husband in real life, it never evolved into anything else.

Hollandsworth’s article finds Gary Johnson in his 50s and he’s still very much living the life his fictional counterpart has at the beginning of the film. He tells his neighbors and the women he sometimes dates that he works in human resources. That’s one way to put it.

Hit Man arrives on Netflix June 7.

Richard Linklater of Dazed and Confused fame paired up with regular collaborator Glen Powell (of Anyone but You fame) to make Hit Man, a romantic action comedy gem that hits theaters May 24.

Powell, who co-wrote the script with Linklater during the pandemic, based on a Texas Monthly article from 2001, plays fake hitman Gary Johnson. As a side gig to complement his career as a philosophy and psychology professor, Gary does tech work for the police until he is asked to step in for their contract killer mole who’s being suspended.

Usually a very unadventurous kind of guy, Gary surprises everyone with how well he takes to the job. So well in fact, that he ends up seducing one of his clients.

Is there an extra scene at the end of Hit Man?

Whether you’re watching it in theaters come May 24, or in the comfort of your home when Hit Man arrives on Netflix June 7, you do not have to stick around until after the credits. Linklater’s film does not have a post-credits scene, even if its ending leaves great potential for a sequel.

The movie, which also stars Adria Arjona (of Morbius fame, poor soul), doesn’t exactly end on a cliffhanger, but we could definitely see this story go into an array of new directions if it does well in theaters and on streaming. The lead couple have chemistry to spare and the character of Gary Johnson has plenty of potential to provide more of that sweet, rare combination of entertainment and cleverness that Hit Man delivered.

Richard Linklater’s Hit Man has all the ingredients to become a streaming hit on Netflix.

The movie, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival back in September 2023, will hit the platform on June 7, and combines a hilarious premise with a steamy love affair between two gorgeous people (always a plus), and a thrill-ride of twists and turns. To add to that already highly effective cocktail, Hit Man is also coated with a kind of thematic richness that makes it insightful beyond just being great entertainment.

Conceived by Linklater and a bright-starred Glen Powell during the pandemic as a fictionalized version of the life of the real Gary Johnson, the film was inspired by a 2001 Texas Monthly article about a fake hitman working for the police. The fictional version played by Powell lives in New Orleans and teaches philosophy and psychology at the university for a living while doing part-time tech work for the police. When an undercover hitman position opens up, Gary is appointed, and despite some initial anxieties, he jumps head-first into the challenge.

Outside of his police work, the leading man lives alone with his two cats, Id and Ego, and his birds, drives a Honda Civic, and maintains the same routine every day, but when he gets his first fake hitman job he discovers a knack for impersonating and dwelling alongside criminals. As Gary creates new personas, carefully crafted to be especially relatable to each client, he describes it as field research for his academic interests, paralleling the film’s main storyline with a continuous reflection on the human personality.

Things take a bit of a turn when one of Gary’s clients turns out to be a woman called Madison (Adria Arjona) who is desperate to escape her abusive husband, a situation which, in his opinion, makes her less deserving of jail time than all his other catches. While in character as the self-assured nonchalant charmer Ron, Gary tells Madison she should use the money that she put aside to order the hit on her husband to leave and get a new life instead. It doesn’t take long before the duo enters a relationship, which starts off as purely sexual but soon evolves into a genuine romance.

Powell and Arjona are sizzling together, their natural sex appeal jumping out of the screen as you immediately bite into this perilous relationship. Although we are fully aware of Gary’s duplicitous game and can notice him slowly morphing into his Ron persona until it no longer feels like an act, Madison is a much more obscure, hard-to-read character. We constantly get the feeling that she’s not fully genuine and that she could be hiding a secret as big as Gary’s, thanks largely to Arjona’s modern-day femme fatale performance, which pairs innocence with danger.

With each different conundrum Gary encounters in this tangled web of reality and play-pretend, there is a college lesson to go along with it, framing it within a wider moral and psychological context. Do we need to take risks to enjoy life to the fullest? Can a person change? What separates instinct from logic? Is murder ever justified? The movie provides partial answers, but often prefers to invite the viewer to engage in their own debates and reach their own conclusions. The plot would remain unaltered if we didn’t get these pauses to theorize about the characters’ choices, but it is undeniably richer for their inclusion.

Even with these large strokes of philosophical musings, Hit Man never takes itself seriously enough to present as a proper think piece, preferring to exist on a much more superficial level instead. Regardless, they do add a special color to what could otherwise just be your run-of-the-mill cop/romantic comedy.

Glen Powell does a wonderful job translating these themes into his performance, which he keeps rightfully understated despite having more than enough excuses for eccentricity. He hops from one character to another, from white trash to Russian mobster, from wig to wig, and accent to accent, but somehow never comes across as ridiculous or overly theatrical. More extensive and subtle are the gradually blurring lines between Gary and Ron, his two most lived-in personalities, which are very precisely constructed in Linklater and Powell’s script, and will almost you by if you’re not paying attention.

It feels rewarding to watch a comedy that is light and thought-provoking in equal measure. The characters and storylines don’t just exist to serve the plot or entertain but to prove a point about human relationships, and you will get a kick out of Hit Man if that’s how you choose to engage with it. The movie’s genius, though, is that it still works as a knotty, unpredictable crime thriller, especially as it ventures into genre-familiar murderous territory, which is all the more engaging for the toned-down brand of dark comedy that adorns it.

Likewise, if the romance plot is more your speed, then there’s plenty of goodness there too. Linklater and Powell never use comedy as an excuse to shy away from delving deeper into the more complicated, complex sides of their leading duo as they get to know each other a bit better (with or without clothes on). There are multiple swoon-worthy, palm-sweating romantic scenes between the two leads even if the pacing of their relationship doesn’t exactly ebb and flow as smoothly as the rest of the film. Nevertheless, you understand what they see in each other at every turn and can’t help but root for their happy ending.

Hit Man excels in the way its script and Linklater’s directing navigate and balance all these tonal differences and genre conventions. Much like its protagonist, the film is an amalgam of personalities, not entirely one thing or the other, but a combination of genres that, through careful writing, each manages to maintain their essence throughout.

There is also a simplicity to it that feels refreshing in the face of the bigger-and-brighter production model that has dominated Hollywood in the past few years. Don’t expect show-stopping set pieces, car chases, fight sequences, convoluted murder plots, or dodgy CGI here. No, Hit Man won’t leave you on the edge of your seat, but it will put your brain to work in different, more contemplative ways, all while dressing it up with good-natured humor, titillating sexiness, and a top-tier career-best performance from Powell.

The festival circuit has always been a hotbed of content awaiting acquisition with the chance of making a splash during awards season, and the seemingly bottomless pockets of Netflix have seen the streaming service shell out north of $40 million to secure three new features out of the Toronto Film Festival that are all dripping in critical acclaim.

The platform has stumped up $7 million for the rights to His Three Daughters, the hard-hitting drama written and directed by Azazel Jacobs that boasts Elizabeth Olsen, Natasha Lyonne, and Carrie Coon in the titular roles, which currently holds a perfect Rotten Tomatoes score of 100 percent following its recent premiere.

That’s in addition to the reported $20 million it cost to seize Richard Linklater’s Hit Man with Glen Powell in the lead, which currently boasts an impressive 98 percent approval rating on the aggregation site. And that’s without even mentioning Anna Kendrick’s feature-length directorial debut and true-life serial killer story Woman of the Hour, either, which required a sum of at least $10 million to secure.

Having spent $40 million on just three films that didn’t even originate from Netflix headquarters, the company will be hoping for a sizeable return on its investment. Whether that’s through viewership figures or awards season recognition remains to be seen, but one thing that can’t be denied is that all three rank among the best-reviewed titles of 2023, and they’re all heading to the same streamer to set up shop.

Its blockbusters may be highly hit-or-miss, but this trio has already been given the seal of approval from critics.