movies

Fresh from wrapping up his MCU Spider-Man trilogy to thunderous effect in No Way Home, filmmaker Jon Watts has ploughed his success into two major new projects. Before too long, we’ll see the Star Wars series he’s helped devise, the kids-lost-in-space adventure series Skeleton Crew. But away from the franchise world, Watts has used his cache to make an original crime movie – with two of Hollywood’s biggest A-listers starring side by side. Get ready for Wolfs, in which two lone-wolf crime scene fixers realise they’ve both been hired to take on the same clean-up job. What happens, then, when Jack (aka George Clooney) and Nick (aka Brad Pitt) are forced to work in close proximity, while finding themselves increasingly out of their depth?

That’s the question that drove Watts to write his screenplay, from which he also directs. “I just wanted to know what it would be like if two of those guys met,” he tells Empire in the Joker: Folie À Deux issue. “Would they kill each other? Or would they become best friends?” The partnership of Jack and Nick is absolutely intended to play on audiences’ existing associations with Clooney and Pitt. The parts were written specifically for them: two of Hollywood’s leading-est men, who, individually, have long inhabited the role of the cool, calm, and collected guy in various twist-filled thrillers. “[They’ve] both played that guy. It’s like two Michael Claytons,” says Watts.