If all you wanted for Christmas is Dwayne Johnson playing Santa Clause, we have some bad news. The action movie star will not be playing old Saint Nick for upcoming film Red One, but he’ll still be portraying someone exciting.
Or at least, that’s what producer Hiram Garcia, who works on many of Johnson’s projects as president of Seven Bucks Productions, says. “For some reason, everyone thinks he’s playing Santa. He’s not playing Santa, but he’s playing something really awesome,” Garcia told SlashFilm. “We’re really excited about it. It’s the movie we’re looking to film next year. We’re thrilled to have Jake Kasdan to direct it, because he is such a master in that space and the tone we’re wanting to do.”
The movie in question is Red One, Johnson’s festive thriller movie that was announced back in June. Garcia describes it as “Hobbs and Shaw meets Guardians of the Galaxy meets Miracle on 34th Street”, so a family movie where Fast and Furious meets the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Sounds utterly ridiculous, but it’s Dwayne Johnson in a Christmas picture, so ridiculous is part of the deal.
The plan, as Garcia puts it, is for the film to “turn the holiday mythology on its head”, with something that’ll be unique for the festive period. “I don’t think there’s ever been anything done like this in that space, which is always very appealing to us,” he explains. “We’re really excited about it, Amazon’s been great with it, and we’re in the process – the script’s about to be written, and we’ll be shooting that next year.”
Considering Christmas films already come in all shapes and sizes, from Die Hard to horror movies like Krampus, and pure kids movies, we’ll have to see just how distinctive this winds up being. Garcia hopes the feature will come out December 2023, where it’ll likely be on streaming service Amazon Prime.
If you’d like to catch Johnson is something sooner than that, you can find him with Ryan Reynolds and Gal Gadot in Red Notice, coming to Netflix November 12.