Taylor Kitsch as Ben Edwards in a profile close-up in The Terminal List: Dark WolfPrime Video
Taylor Kitsch was given perhaps the biggest platform a young actor could ask for in Hollywood, with three major movies releasing in the span of a single year. However, such a high-profile launch can be a double-edged sword. When none of the three movies did well at the box office, Kitsch found himself having to rebuild from the ground up. The comeback took several years, and he’s now landing lead roles in major projects again. In the last couple of years, he has headlined the Netflix Western limited series American Primeval and the Prime Video action spin-off The Terminal List: Dark Wolf. Fans of his work have an opportunity to check out one of his first major movies, which is streaming on Netflix for the remainder of September.
The film was released in 2012, along with the epic sci-fi tentpoles John Carter and Battleship. Unlike those films, which cost a combined total of more than $500 million and tanked at the box office, Kitsch’s other 2012 release was a mid-budget crime-thriller. It was directed by A-list filmmaker Oliver Stone, and featured a stacked cast that included Blake Lively, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, John Travolta, Salma Hayek, Benicio del Toro, and Demián Bichir. The movie follows two small-time marijuana growers who get caught in a battle with a Mexican cartel.
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Collider Exclusive · Action Franchise Quiz What Action Series Would You Thrive In? Wick · Fast · Mission · Die Hard
Four franchises. Four completely different ideas of what a hero is: the assassin with a code, the family that never leaves anyone behind, the man who does his own stunts, and the guy who simply refuses to die. Only one of them runs on your particular brand of trouble. Eight questions will tell you which one you would survive.
🐕Wick
🏁Fast
🧨Mission
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🎄Die Hard
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01
How does a room know you’ve walked into it? Every action hero arrives differently. Some of them arrive before they arrive.
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02
It turns physical. What does your fighting actually look like? Choreography is character. Yours says something about you.
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03
Who is standing beside you when it starts? Some franchises are built on a team. Others are built on one person walking in alone.
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04
It has gone badly wrong. What keeps you upright? Act two exists to find out what you’re actually made of.
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05
There’s a vehicle. What are you driving, and how? No action franchise has ever survived without a car chase. This one is yours.
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06
How do you feel about the people giving the orders? There is always an institution. There is rarely a good one.
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07
Underneath all of it, what are you actually doing this for? The stunts are the reason people come. This is the reason they stay.
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08
When the credits roll, what do people say about you? Every franchise is really an argument about what makes someone worth watching.
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Casting Has Been Completed Your Franchise Is…
Four action series. One of them is built around exactly the way you
handle pressure, people, and a room that has just gone very quiet. Here is where you would survive
the trilogy, and probably headline it.
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John Wick · Chapters 1–4 · 2014–2023
John Wick
You are precision with a grudge. You don’t posture, you don’t
escalate, and you don’t warn anybody twice. That is exactly why the people who know you are
so careful never to be the reason you start.
The Wick films run on discipline: an underworld with actual etiquette, a hero who
honours every rule of it, and a world that unravels the instant someone breaks one
against him.
You share that quality. You are extraordinarily reasonable right up to the line, and
then completely immovable past it.
Focus, commitment and sheer will. You’d be the one carrying grief through three sequels
and turning it into technique rather than noise.
People wouldn’t call you dangerous. They’d say your name quietly and let that do the
work.
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The Fast and the Furious · Fast X · 2001–2023
Fast & Furious
You understand the thing the whole franchise is secretly about:
the cars are spectacular, but the crew is the point. You collect people, you keep them, and
you’d drive through a building for any one of them.
This series went from street racing to orbit without ever changing its actual subject,
because loyalty scales and plot doesn’t have to.
You have the same instinct. You build a family out of whoever turns up, and then you
defend it past the point of reason.
You’d thrive here because the franchise rewards exactly your strengths: warmth, nerve,
an absolute refusal to leave anyone behind, and a relaxed relationship with physics.
The mission can wait. The barbecue cannot.
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Mission: Impossible · The Final Reckoning · 1996–2025
Mission: Impossible
You over-prepare and then take the dangerous part yourself
anyway. It looks like control, but it’s really responsibility. You have never worked out how
to ask somebody else to carry the risk.
This is the franchise of the plan that collapses on schedule: the team, the mask, the
rooftop, and the one person sprinting flat out because sprinting is all that’s left.
You share that refusal to accept an outcome. Told the odds, you treat them as an
administrative error.
You’d thrive here because these films reward competence and loyalty in equal measure.
The mission matters, but nobody on the team gets left on the wrong side of a door.
Some people delegate the cliff. You have never once been that person.
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Die Hard · A Good Day to Die Hard · 1988–2013
Die Hard
You are not the most trained person in the building, the best
equipped, or the one anybody would have picked. You are simply the one still standing at the
end, which turns out to be the only qualification that matters.
Die Hard invented the modern action hero by making him mortal: outgunned, out-planned,
bleeding, and extremely funny about it.
You share that stubbornness. Adversity doesn’t make you noble, it makes you sarcastic,
and then it makes you unstoppable.
You’d thrive here because these films reward improvisation and nerve over preparation,
and you’ve never had the luxury of preparing anyway.
You didn’t want any of this. You just declined to be the person who let it happen.
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Taylor Kitsch Is Slated to Star in His First Movie Since 2019
The movie we’re talking about is Savages, which underperformed commercially and received mixed reviews upon release. It now holds a 50% score on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, where the consensus reads, “It’s undeniably messy, but Savages finds Oliver Stone returning to dark, fearlessly lurid form.” The movie grossed $86 million worldwide against a reported budget of $45 million. Three years later, Taylor Sheridan and Denis Villeneuve‘s Sicario grossed almost exactly the same amount at the global box office, but cost $10 million less. It emerged as a major home-video hit, which prompted a sequel to be made. Savages, however, slipped into the ether. You can watch it on Netflix until October 1. Kitsch is set to headline his first new movie in seven years. Directed by Peter Landesman, the crime thriller is titled Eleven Days. Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.
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