Patrick Hughes, the franchise director who made his own War Machine

Patrick Hughes

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	May 13, 1978 Melbourne, Australia
Occupation	Film Director
Known for	The Hitman's Bodyguard, War Machine, The Expendables 3
Awards	Tropfest Grand Prize · CinEuphoria Award, Best Short Film · AFI Award nomination, Best Editing in a Non-Feature Film · AACTA Award nomination, Best Original Screenplay

Every director who spends a decade in franchise territory gets filed somewhere. You become the person studios call when they need reliable commercial product, not the one they call when they have something they actually believe in. Patrick Hughes spent most of the 2010s making that deal with Hollywood and delivering on it. The Hitman’s Bodyguard ran three consecutive weeks at number one worldwide. The sequel made $70 million. None of it made critics particularly interested in what Hughes might do next. War Machine forced them to recalibrate.

The starting point was shorter than most people realize. Born in Melbourne in 1978 and trained at the Victorian College of the Arts, Hughes cut his teeth making short films while building commercial directing credits. His 2001 short The Lighter — a three-minute black comedy about a driver’s futile attempts to light a cigarette — won the Tropfest Grand Prize, Australia’s premier short film festival award. Then came Signs (2008), a more kinetic action piece that won the CinEuphoria Award for Best Short Film. Sylvester Stallone saw it, called Hughes, and offered him The Expendables 3.

Being hired by one of Hollywood’s defining action stars to direct the third entry in a franchise that had already made its commercial point is both an opportunity and a kind of verdict: you get the budget, you lose some of the authorial control. The Expendables 3 (2014) gathered a cast that included Harrison Ford, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Mel Gibson as the villain, and delivered exactly what the franchise required. Critics were unmoved — 32 percent on Rotten Tomatoes — but the film earned $214 million worldwide, enough to confirm Hughes as someone who could handle scale.

The Hitman’s Bodyguard (2017) went further. Ryan Reynolds and Samuel L. Jackson in a road-movie-meets-action-comedy about a disgraced bodyguard escorting a hitman to The Hague — the pitch sounds like a dozen other things, but the execution was sharp enough to run three consecutive weeks at number one worldwide. $176 million in global box office. A 44 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. The critical math and the commercial math pointed in entirely different directions, and Hughes’s career settled into the space between them.

The sequel, Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard (2021), expanded the cast to include Salma Hayek and Morgan Freeman, and delivered significantly diminished returns: $70 million worldwide and 26 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. The Man from Toronto (2022), a Netflix film pairing Kevin Hart with Woody Harrelson around a mistaken-identity premise, landed at 23 percent. The critical narrative about Hughes had become self-fulfilling: if you expected disposable franchise work, that was largely what you found.

What the criticism missed — or chose not to examine — was that Hughes had spent this entire period building toward something parallel. In 2021 he co-founded Huge Film with producer Greg McLean and his regular creative partner James Beaufort. The intention was to develop projects where Hughes had authorial investment from the earliest stage: not the hired director brought in to execute someone else’s idea.

War Machine was the result. Co-written with Beaufort and co-produced through Huge Film, it stars Alan Ritchson as a military specialist who encounters an extraterrestrial killing machine during a Ranger training exercise in Colorado. Hughes shot the alien encounter sequences like a horror film — using dread and atmospheric tension rather than the CGI-heavy spectacle approach that similar concepts had deployed before. Netflix released it worldwide in March 2026. Within 91 days it reached 147 million views, making it the most-watched Netflix film of the first half of the year and the tenth most-watched in the platform’s history at the time. The critical reception was substantially warmer than anything Hughes had received in a decade: 66 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

A sequel, reportedly titled War Machines, is confirmed in development at Netflix, with Hughes and Ritchson both returning. Simultaneously, Hughes has begun filming an Amazon MGM biopic about Navy SEAL and Congressional Medal of Honor recipient Mike Thornton — produced by Stallone and shot in Queensland — the state where Hughes grew up watching the Australian film industry he would eventually leave to work in Hollywood.

The director who got his start from a three-minute Tropfest short now has two major productions in motion simultaneously. The deal he made with the franchise machine turned out to have a clause he wrote himself.