It was to be the summer of Dave Bautista. The season began with Avengers: Endgame. In the middle there would be the comic thriller Stuber, out this weekend. (There’s also Escape Plan: The Extractors, which hits straight-to-VOD next week.) And then it would end with My Spy, out August 23. But now, as noted by The Hollywood Reporter, the latter suddenly disappeared from the schedule, with no explanation why and no word when it would return.
My Spy is one of those family comedies that ropes in a hardened tough guy, like The Pacifier (Vin Diesel) or The Tooth Fairy (Dwayne Johnson) or, going way back, Kindergarten Cop (Arnold Schwarzenegger). Like those it pairs the wrestler-turned-regular movie strongman with a kid. As per the IMDb description: “A hardened CIA operative finds himself at the mercy of a precocious 9-year-old girl, having been sent undercover to surveil her family.” (The precocious nine-year-old in question is Chloe Coleman, of Big Little Lies and Avatar 2.)
You’ll have to wait to see how Bautista fares in this micro-genre, and who knows for how long. In their piece, THR speculates that it could have been about putting some space between it and Stuber, in which Bautista’s detective uses an Uber to conduct an investigation.
THR also points out that My Spy’s parent company, STX Entertainment, have been struggling of late, thanks to the box office bomb trifecta of Poms, UglyDolls, and The Best of Enemies. Then again, The Upside — their The Intouchables remake with Kevin Hart, Bryan Cranston, and Nicole Kidman — was a massive hit, so who knows what the real story is or when anyone will be seeing Drax joke it up with a moppet.
(Via THR)
