With his longtime creative collaborator, director Guy Ritchie, going through a difficult period at the box office, Jason Statham will need to rely on every last ounce of his star power for their next film together, Viva La Madness. Ritchie and Statham remain major draws on streaming, both together and individually. But the filmmaker hasn't made a hit since Wrath of Man, which was released in 2021 and marked his long-awaited reunion with Statham. The two started out together in the late 1990s with the generation-defining gangster movie Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. They worked together again on Snatch and Revolver, and charted independent paths in Hollywood over the next 15 years. After reuniting with Ritchie on Wrath of Man, Statham delivered two back-to-back hits directed by David Ayer.

2026 is angling to be a big year for Jake Gyllenhaal, who is looking to get back on track with a box office hit after a string of misfires with The Covenant and The Bride. Gyllenhaal reunites with his Covenant director for his new action thriller, In The Grey, which co-stars Henry Cavill (Man of Steel) and Eiza González (The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare). Between his latest box office misses, Gyllenhaal did star in one of the best legal thrillers on TV in the last few years with Presumed Innocent, but he is not expected to return in Season 2 of the anthology series, which now stars Rachel Brosnahan (Superman). Gyllenhaal has been tapped to star in the next M. Night Shyamalan thriller, Remain, but the film has been delayed to early 2027 after it was originally revealed for late 2026.

Few action directors have produced as many hits over the years as David Ayer, who most recently teamed with Jason Statham for the 2025 action classic, A Working Man. The film is viewed as a spiritual successor to another Ayer-Statham collaboration, The Beekeeper, which buzzed into theaters the year prior and grossed over $160 million at the global box office. All the way back in 2012, Ayer worked with Michael Peña and Jake Gyllenhaal for End of Watch, which is still hailed to this day as one of the grittiest police procedurals ever made. Ayer encountered a bump in the road in 2016 when he directed Suicide Squad, but it’s widely known that the movie was derailed by studio interference. Two years before Suicide Squad, he teamed up with Brad Pitt for the epic WWII movie, Fury, and now he’s set to reunite with the Oscar-winner for a new movie officially coming this year.