Kevin Hart is a failing fitness entrepreneur taken for a feared assassin, and Woody Harrelson the real killer who decides to play along, in a Patrick Hughes action comedy that lost Jason Statham, a year to the pandemic and its cinema release before Netflix bought it.

There is a version of The Man from Toronto that only ever existed on paper: a January 2020 package at Sony Pictures that paired Jason Statham with Kevin Hart in a story about a man who walks into the wrong room and is taken for a professional killer. The film that reached Netflix on June 24, 2022 is a different object. Directed by Patrick Hughes, it swapped Statham for Woody Harrelson, lost a year to the pandemic, changed distributor along the way and arrived as a 112-minute action comedy built on one of the oldest engines in screen comedy, mistaken identity.

A wrong cabin and a borrowed reputation

Kevin Hart plays Teddy Jackson, a fitness entrepreneur from Yorktown, Virginia, whose business ideas keep failing in small and very public ways. When the story opens he has just been fired from his job at a local gym, a fact he decides to hide from his wife, Lori (Jasmine Mathews). Instead, he books her a birthday weekend in Onancock, on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, leaves her at a spa and drives on to the rental cabin. It is the wrong cabin. Inside, a man named Coughlin is being held hostage, and the people holding him are waiting for the Man from Toronto, a mysterious assassin with a reputation for brutal interrogations. They decide Teddy is him.

The screenplay’s first joke is that the bluff works. Teddy, terrified and improvising, frightens Coughlin into giving up a code. When the FBI raids the cabin, the agents see an opportunity rather than a mix-up: they ask Teddy to keep pretending to be Toronto so that they can reach Colonel Marín (Alejandro de Hoyos), a would-be Venezuelan dictator, and in exchange they offer to pay off the Jacksons’ overdue mortgage. That deal puts Teddy on a plane to San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the company of Marín’s wife, Daniela (Lela Loren), with orders to track down Coughlin’s partner.

When the real assassin turns up

Woody Harrelson plays the actual Man from Toronto, whose real name turns out to be Randy. He intercepts Teddy on the way and, rather than expose the impostor, decides the ruse is useful: as long as Teddy keeps wearing the name, Randy can still collect a $2 million contract. His employer, a broker known only as the Handler (Ellen Barkin), is less patient and sends a rival killer, the Man from Miami (Pierson Fodé). The script expands that conceit into a small private mythology of city-named assassins, which by the final act also includes a Man from Tokyo (Tomohisa Yamashita), a Man from Moscow (Oleg Taktarov) and three brothers who answer collectively to the Man from Tacoma.

The MacGuffin is a seismic bomb developed for DARPA and protected by a dual failsafe: Coughlin’s code and a thumbprint belonging to his partner, Green. Marín wants the weapon to assassinate the president of Venezuela during a visit to Washington. Around that spy-thriller frame the story keeps circling back to smaller things — the Jacksons’ marriage and the lie at the heart of it, Lori’s friend Anne (Kaley Cuoco), who catches Randy’s eye, and Randy’s own wish to leave the trade and open a restaurant. His most prized possession is a 1969 Dodge Charger he calls Debora, a detail the plot does not forget.

A package that kept changing shape

The project was announced in January 2020 as a Sony Pictures release, with a script by Robbie Fox and three producers from Escape Artists: Jason Blumenthal, Todd Black and Steve Tisch, with Bill Bannerman also attached. In March, around six weeks before cameras were due to roll, Statham walked away after disagreements with the producers over the film’s tone and its rating. Harrelson took over the role. Cuoco joined the cast in April and Fodé in May; Mathews, Barkin, Loren and Yamashita were announced in October.

The shoot had been planned for Atlanta in April 2020, until the COVID-19 shutdown stopped it. Filming finally began on October 12, 2020, in the Toronto area, with many of the major scenes shot in Milton, Ontario. So a film whose title points at Toronto was, unusually, made around the city — even though most of its story takes place in Virginia, Washington and Puerto Rico. The final screenplay is credited to Robbie Fox and Chris Bremner, from a story by Fox and Blumenthal.

The release history is a small case study of the period. Sony first dated the film for November 20, 2020, then moved it to September 17, 2021, pulled it from the calendar in March 2021, reset it for January 14, 2022 and pushed it again to August 12, 2022. In April 2022 Sony sold the distribution rights to Netflix, which already had a deal with the studio to stream its films after their cinema and home-video windows. Netflix took the film worldwide except China, where Sony kept distribution, along with home entertainment and linear television rights. The reported budget was $75 million.

Patrick Hughes and the mismatched-partner formula

For Hughes, the Australian director who made his name with the modern western Red Hill (2010) before moving to Hollywood with The Expendables 3 (2014), the film continues a run of buddy action comedies. The Hitman’s Bodyguard (2017) paired Ryan Reynolds with Samuel L. Jackson, and its sequel, Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard, came out in 2021. The Man from Toronto uses a related setup — a professional killer saddled with someone who has no business being near the job — but flips the balance of power: here it is the civilian who carries the fearsome reputation, and the professional who has to protect it.

Hart had worked the same seam from the other side, opposite Ice Cube in Ride Along (2014) and Dwayne Johnson in Central Intelligence (2016), each time as the ordinary man dragged into a professional’s world. Harrelson brings a different track record, from Natural Born Killers to No Country for Old Men and the Zombieland films, much of it built on characters who are funny and dangerous in the same breath. The casting is, on paper, the whole pitch: Hart’s fast, anxious screen persona set against Harrelson’s older and drier one, a contrast the Netflix trailer puts front and centre.

The people behind the camera

The crew list is stronger than the genre usually gets. The film was shot by Rob Hardy, the British cinematographer of Ex Machina, Annihilation and Mission: Impossible – Fallout, and edited by Craig Alpert, whose credits include Pineapple Express and Deadpool 2. The score is by Ramin Djawadi, the composer of Game of Thrones and Westworld. Black, Blumenthal and Tisch had produced The Equalizer films together at Escape Artists, and Tisch also shares a Best Picture Oscar as a producer of Forrest Gump. Bron Creative joined Sony and Escape Artists as a credited studio.

How it landed on Netflix

Whatever the film lost in its cinema release, it found an audience at home. According to Netflix’s own Top 10 data, The Man from Toronto entered the platform’s English-language films chart at number one in the week ending June 26, 2022, with 53.89 million hours viewed, and grew to 62.64 million hours the following week, still at the top. It then held on at third, fourth and seventh place, finishing six weeks in the chart with roughly 170.8 million hours in total. It was number one in Spain, Mexico and Canada in each of its first two weeks, and second in the United States.

Those figures say more about the platform than about the film: a recognisable star pairing and a one-line premise travel well on a streaming home screen, where a viewer decides in seconds. They also explain why the mid-budget studio comedy, squeezed out of cinemas in those years, found a second life as a streaming event — the same route taken by several of the studio films Netflix picked up during the pandemic.

A closing note

The Man from Toronto is a clear specimen of its moment: developed for cinemas, reshaped by a casting change and a pandemic, then sold to a platform that could put it in front of a global audience over a single weekend. What it offers is a familiar formula — a mistaken-identity premise, a mismatched pair and a hit-man world with a sense of humour about itself. How well that formula holds will depend mostly on the viewer’s appetite for Hart’s and Harrelson’s established personas, and for a kind of comedy that was running on this engine long before anyone pressed play at home.