Simon Cellan Jones’s 2023 film casts Mark Wahlberg as a Buffalo car salesman whose old life as a government assassin catches up with him and Michelle Monaghan as the wife who knows nothing about it, in a genre piece built on the oldest joke in the action-comedy book: the nice man next door is not who he says he is.

Dan Morgan sells cars in the suburbs of Buffalo, New York. He is married to Jessica, has two teenagers, Nina and Kyle, and a baby called Max, and he has a declared dislike of violence, gadgets and social media. Jessica, for her part, would like a little more spontaneity in their marriage. That is the household at the centre of The Family Plan, the 2023 action comedy directed by Simon Cellan Jones, with Mark Wahlberg as Dan and Michelle Monaghan as Jessica. The joke of the premise is that Dan’s caution has nothing to do with temperament: before Buffalo, he was a government assassin, and nobody at home knows.

A selfie, a supermarket and a road trip to Las Vegas

The cover holds until an anniversary outing to an amusement park, where a stranger snaps a selfie with the couple kissing in the background and posts it online as a joke. Soon after, Dan is attacked by a highly trained stranger in a supermarket while he is out shopping with the baby, and he dispatches him with ease. His old associate Augie, played by Saïd Taghmaoui, a forger of new identities, points to the obvious suspect: McCaffrey, Dan’s former employer, played by Ciarán Hinds, and his advice is to disappear.

Dan’s version of disappearing is a family holiday. He orders fake passports from Augie, picks up Nina from school, pulls Kyle out of the gaming house where he has a following as a streamer, collects Jessica from work and announces a spontaneous road trip to Las Vegas, where the new papers are waiting. Nobody in the minivan is told that the trip is an escape. The screenplay by David Coggeshall builds its comedy on that gap: a father fighting a private war at every stop while the rest of the family believes they are on an impromptu holiday.

The route supplies the set pieces. Dan finds and removes a tracker hidden under the minivan, drives through the night to Iowa City and agrees to a campus visit for Nina, who hopes to follow her boyfriend to college instead of aiming for Stanford. When she catches the boyfriend cheating, her father teaches her a few self-defence moves, and later, during the tour, he takes care of another of McCaffrey’s assassins in a chemistry lab. Maggie Q plays Gwen, a new acquaintance of Jessica’s whose part in the story is less innocent than it first looks. In Las Vegas the secret finally comes out, and the last act adds a revelation about McCaffrey that the sequel would later build on.

The director and the team behind it

Simon Cellan Jones, born in 1963, is a British director and the son of the director James Cellan Jones. He came up through British television in the 1990s, with episodes of Cracker and Our Friends in the North, and his first feature, Some Voices (2000), earned him a BAFTA nomination as best newcomer. After a second film, The One and Only (2002), he spent two decades mostly in television on both sides of the Atlantic: Generation Kill, Treme, Boardwalk Empire, Jessica Jones, The Expanse, Years and Years and The Diplomat.

The connection with Wahlberg runs through Ballers, the HBO series created by Stephen Levinson, which Wahlberg executive-produced and Cellan Jones directed between 2015 and 2018. The Family Plan was the first of three features the pair released in quick succession: it was followed by Arthur the King, the true story of an adventure racer and a stray dog, released in March 2024, and by The Family Plan 2 in 2025. Seen from that angle, the film is a working partnership as much as a stand-alone project.

Apple Studios produced it together with Skydance Media and Municipal Pictures, with David Ellison, Dana Goldberg, Don Granger, Mark Wahlberg and Stephen Levinson credited as producers. Michael Burgess was the director of photography, Kevin Matley wrote the score and Tim Porter edited the film, which runs 119 minutes. Apple announced the project in August 2022, and Monaghan and Taghmaoui joined the cast that October.

Principal photography began in October 2022 in Atlanta, Georgia, under the working title Holiday Road, the same name as the Lindsey Buckingham song from National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983), the reference point for family road-trip comedy. A car dealership in Canton, Georgia, was used as a location, an ice cream shop in Clermont, Georgia, was turned into Lambert’s Diner, and a helicopter filmed aerial footage over downtown Buffalo in early November. Wahlberg filmed scenes at The Strat casino resort in Las Vegas in February 2023, when production wrapped.

Who plays the Morgans

For Mark Wahlberg, the role sits squarely in a lane he has driven for years, alternating straight action, from Lone Survivor to Mile 22, with broad comedy such as The Other Guys and Daddy’s Home. The Family Plan combines the two in the same character: a family man who has to be believable in the school run and in a gunfight within the same few minutes of running time.

Michelle Monaghan, born in 1976 in Winthrop, Iowa, brings a résumé that suits the part unusually well. In Mission: Impossible III, Ghost Protocol and Fallout she played Julia, the wife of a man who leads a secret double life as a spy, and she had already worked opposite Wahlberg in Patriots Day (2016). Her other credits include Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Gone Baby Gone, Source Code and the first season of True Detective, which brought her a Golden Globe nomination. Coggeshall’s script gives Jessica a past as a decathlete, a detail it plants early and comes back to later.

Zoe Colletti, who led Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019), plays Nina, and Van Crosby plays Kyle. Around them, the antagonists come with recognisable faces: Ciarán Hinds, an Oscar nominee for Belfast, as McCaffrey; Maggie Q, the lead of the series Nikita, as Gwen; and Saïd Taghmaoui, a familiar presence since La Haine, as Augie. The henchmen include the rapper Joyner Lucas and Felicia Pearson, remembered as Snoop in The Wire, and the streamer Valkyrae appears as herself.

Release, viewing figures and a sequel

The Family Plan went straight to Apple TV+ on 15 December 2023, a release timed for the holiday season. Critics were mostly cool on it, but the audience response was a different story: it was reported to have become the most-watched film in the history of the service, a record that held until Wolfs, the George Clooney and Brad Pitt comedy, took it in 2024.

Those numbers settled the question of a follow-up. In March 2024 Cellan Jones said that a sequel was being written, and on 30 October 2024 Apple confirmed The Family Plan 2, with the same director, the same writer and Wahlberg producing again. Monaghan, Colletti and Crosby returned, and Kit Harington joined as Finn Clarke, alongside Sidse Babett Knudsen. Shooting began in January 2025, with scenes filmed at Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden and Shepperton Studios, and the film was released on 21 November 2025 on Apple TV, as the service is now called. This time the family trip is a Christmas visit to Nina in London that turns into a chase across Europe.

Where it sits in the genre

The idea of a spouse with a secret career in violence has a long line behind it, from True Lies (1994) to Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005), and the suburban father with a buried lethal past returned more recently with Nobody (2021). What The Family Plan adds is the minivan: by sending the whole family on the road, it crosses the spy comedy with the family holiday movie its working title points to, and it adds a generational layer through Kyle’s gaming and Nina’s college plans. It belongs to the category of mid-budget, star-led action comedies that the streaming services began producing in volume once they became studios in their own right.

A closing note

The Family Plan is not designed to reinvent anything. It is a vehicle built around a star who has spent years at the junction of action and comedy, with an ensemble of reliable character actors and a premise that can be explained in one sentence. Whether that is a limitation or exactly the point depends on what one asks of a December streaming film. Its audience numbers and the sequel that followed suggest that, for a large number of viewers, the familiar shape of the story was the main attraction.