With “Free Guy,” a new movie featuring Ryan Reynolds is hitting theaters. The new trailer suggests the film looks like a lot of fun. It seems that the creators have somehow merged Deadpool with GTA Online.
When does “Free Guy” come to theaters? The release date for Free Guy in Germany is December 10, on a Thursday. The film was originally intended to be a summer blockbuster, but COVID intervened.
This is the basic idea of Free Guy: Ryan Reynolds plays Guy, just a “guy” for whom no one bothered to come up with a last name. It became clear to the audience in the first teaser in 2019: Essentially, Guy lives as an NPC in a world like GTA Online:
- While he leads an ordinary life as a cashier in a bank, feeds his goldfish, and gets coffee
- colorfully costumed robbers run around him, shooting wildly and shouting “Yay” while causing chaos
- Guy and his friends seem to accept this with complete equanimity: That’s just their life
Back in 2019, the film seemed to pose the question, “What if GTA 5 were real?”
This is what the new trailer shows: A new longer trailer for Free Guy has now been released. It introduces additional characters for the first time and outlines that the film has something more to add to its basic idea, namely something like a story:
- There is a developer (Jodie Comer) who apparently begins a romantic relationship with “Guy” and must explain to her bewildered colleagues what she is actually doing
- Guy seems to awaken to the absurdity of the world, while his best friend (Lil Rey Howery) has no awareness and just accepts everything as it is
- the “villain” (Taika Waititi) appears to be the capitalistic operator of the game, whose plans “Guy” is ruining as he suddenly starts to be nice
GTA Online Meets Deadpool
This is why the film looks good: What can be seen in the trailer is that the creators of the film apparently understand video game culture in online games like GTA Online. Players perform crazy stunts because they can and because there are zero consequences for them: NPCs get punched in the face casually, no one brakes for them, and there are absurd death traps in everyday life like the “Murder Train,” which just runs people over – and does so constantly.
The exaggerated, heavily armed violence with Gatling guns and rocket launchers also captures the feeling of the new, beautiful video game world.
The creators seem to be trying to capture the tone of “Deadpool,” but they are probably aiming more for the PG-12 version. The film has not yet been rated, but it looks family-friendly. One cannot say the same about Deadpool.
With the two cinema hits of Deadpool, Ryan Reynolds finally arrived in the mainstream and became a favorite of video game and nerd culture. In 2011, Reynolds made quite a mess with “Green Lantern,” but the Canadian seems to be making up for it.
He enjoys poking fun at his “previous missteps” in the new films.
Video games are becoming increasingly popular worldwide, fully entering the mainstream. While movies based on video games used to be mainly action spectacles with B-movie character, even classic blockbusters and quirky comedy series now tackle the theme.
Thus, the series “Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet” follows an MMORPG:
In the new TV series, the largest MMORPG in the world is developed by a madman
