Back in May, Netflix paid more than $50 million to get the distributions rights to Fantastic Beasts series director David Yates’ Pain Hustlers, a movie about a woman who gets swept up in a conspiracy while working for a failing pharmaceutical start-up in Florida. The woman will be played by Emily Blunt, and the movie has been pitched as something akin to The Big Short, American Hustle, or The Wolf Of Wall Street (say what you will about Adam McKay, but that’s some serious Big Talk for the guy who made the Fantastic Beasts movies).
Now we also know (thanks to Deadline) that Chris Evans will be joining Blunt in the film, or at least that he’s in “final negotiations” to join her. That’s what Deadline says, and though we don’t know who Evans might be playing, we would wager that this will be a Knives Out-style opportunity for him to use his cool, nice guy charm for evil. After all, every pharmaceutical start-up needs some douchey asshole to be the face of the business, profiting from the hard work done by good—if increasingly morally compromised—people like Emily Blunt (or the character she’s playing).
Also, as we like to point out when this happens: Pain Hustlers will keep Evans in the Netflix family, since Netflix loves reusing the same actors across different Netflix projects (almost as much as Netflix loves firing people who don’t deserve the blame for any financial issues). Evans’ other Netflix project, the Russo brothers’ The Gray Man with Ryan Gosling, is coming to streaming on July 22 (after a limited release in theaters on July 15). And speaking of Knives Out, we’ve got our fingers crossed that he’ll show up in one of those Netflix sequels as a Hannibal Lecter figure who has to help Benoit Blanc solve some mystery from behind bars.