Netflix’s Hit Man Series Drops Glen Powell From the Lead

Netflix is developing a Hit Man TV series with Stephen Falk, the creator of FXX’s You’re the Worst, writing, and Glen Powell and Richard Linklater attached as executive producers, Deadline first reported on June 12, 2026. The show is built on the 2024 film, in which Powell co-wrote and starred. Netflix declined to comment on the series order.

The premise is the same as the movie’s, a college professor who moonlights as a police contractor and uses elaborate disguises to pose as a fake hit man to entrap suspects. The series lands as Powell’s streaming slate grows, even after his starring role in Paramount’s $110 million The Running Man opened to $17 million domestic and $28.2 million global in November 2025. The original film was a $20 million Netflix acquisition out of the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival and went on to score Powell a Golden Globe nomination for his lead performance, plus a Writers Guild of America nomination for Powell and Linklater’s adapted screenplay.

Netflix’s Hit Man Series Lands, With Powell Behind the Camera

Netflix is developing a Hit Man TV series written by Stephen Falk, the creator of FXX’s You’re the Worst, with Glen Powell and Linklater on board. The series order and full production team was first reported by Deadline on June 12, 2026. Powell and Linklater are executive producers on the project, alongside BarnStorm Productions’ Dan Cohen and AGC Television’s Stuart Ford, Miguel A. Palos Jr, and Lourdes Diaz. The series is being produced by Powell’s BarnStorm Productions alongside AGC Television; Netflix declined to comment.

Deadline reports the series will likely follow the movie’s premise of an unassuming police contractor, a college professor, who uses elaborate disguises and develops different characters to pose as a fake hitman and expose suspects looking to get someone killed. The premise draws a line to J.J. Abrams’ ABC spy drama Alias, whose protagonist also assumed multiple identities. The Playlist, which also reported the news, added that “the project won’t star Powell, but it’ll be inspired by the movie’s set-up of assumed undercover identities.” The film itself, a co-write between Powell and Linklater, was announced by AGC Studios in May 2022, with international sales in place before the fall 2022 start of production. The new show keeps the original producers in the room and steps Powell out of the central role.

Why the Disguise Engine Travels Without Its Star

The film made Powell’s disguise work famous. In the movie, his Gary Johnson slips into elaborate prosthetics and persona swaps, a philosophy professor moonlighting as a fake hit man for police sting operations. Each character is a costume: a wig, an accent, a posture, built on the fly to match whoever the suspect wants to hire. The disguise engine is the movie’s whole comedy engine, and the engine does not actually need Powell’s face. The TV premise frees the writers to recast the central role while keeping the device.

The “no star” structure is also a familiar one for stream-anchored series built on a working premise. CBR notes the show is expected to follow a similar premise, though it is unclear if the project will be a true remake of the movie or exist in the same universe as it, “which opens the door for Powell or any of the movie’s other cast members to make guest appearances.” The model is less a sequel than a franchise: the series owns the disguise mechanic, the producers own the brand, and the lead is open.

The full production team, as Deadline reports, includes:

• Executive producers: Stephen Falk, Richard Linklater, Glen Powell, Dan Cohen (BarnStorm Productions), Stuart Ford, Miguel A. Palos Jr, and Lourdes Diaz (AGC Television)
• Co-executive producers: Steve Barnett, Alan Powell, Vicky Patel, Shivani Rawat, and Julie Goldstein
• Production companies: BarnStorm Productions and AGC Television
• Writer: Stephen Falk
• Studio: Netflix

The team mirrors the film’s producing structure almost line for line, with Powell’s BarnStorm and AGC Television back together on the series. AGC and BarnStorm were the two production companies on the 2024 film, and the same AGC team that sold the project to Netflix at TIFF in 2023 is producing the series. Co-executive producers on the new show include Steve Barnett, Alan Powell, Vicky Patel, Shivani Rawat, and Julie Goldstein, all of whom held producer or EP credits on the original film.

Stephen Falk Brings a Mixed TV Track Record

The man writing the new series has spent nearly two decades bouncing between cable and streaming comedy. Falk created, executive produced, and showran FXX’s You’re the Worst, which ran for five seasons from 2014 to 2019. He has also written for Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black, Showtime’s Weeds, and Apple TV’s Hello Tomorrow!. He is repped by UTA.

The track record is mixed. You’re the Worst is the critical high mark, an FXX comedy that earned Falk his strongest reviews and held a five-season run on a hard-to-land cable slot. The other credits are working-ensemble roles on shows that aired for several seasons without breaking out, and Hello Tomorrow! is a recent Apple TV+ series that lasted one season. The Hit Man series will be his first original series run since You’re the Worst ended, on a streamer with a much larger built-in audience. The premise is also the kind of long-arc disguise show that TV writers have spent years mapping onto Alias and, more recently, onto Powell’s Hulu series Chad Powers, where Powell wears prosthetics in a college football disguise of his own. The assignment is a fit; the tonal target is open.

A $20 Million True Story From a Texas College Classroom

The Netflix series will not be adapting fiction. The Hit Man film, and the series it is built on, trace back to a 2001 Texas Monthly article by Skip Hollandsworth about a real Houston-area police contractor named Gary Johnson. Johnson spent decades posing as a hit man to entrap people trying to hire a killer, and he was, in the words of one Texas Monthly source, “the Laurence Olivier of the field.”

The film kept Johnson’s name and several of his quirks, including his catchphrase All pie is good pie, but it also moved the action to New Orleans and added the romantic engine with Adria Arjona’s Madison. The real Gary Johnson behind the film had been on Linklater’s radar since the article ran, and the two men are friends who co-wrote 2011’s Bernie, also based on Hollandsworth’s reporting. The project came together during the pandemic, when Powell reached out to Linklater about the story. The screenplay won a 2025 Writers Guild Award nomination for adapted screenplay, and Powell’s lead performance earned a Golden Globe nomination, the film’s two largest awards marks. The film had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival before its North American bow at Toronto, where Netflix closed the $20 million deal and the film went on to a June 2024 streaming debut.

That last point is the one that matters for the series order. The film is owned by AGC Studios, the company that produced it alongside Powell, Linklater, and others. AGC is back on board the series, alongside Powell’s BarnStorm, and the same group of producers, including Julie Goldstein, Steve Barnett, Stuart Ford, Shivani Rawat, Alan Powell, and Vicky Patel, are now co-executive producers on the show. The structure is the typical one when a streamer is recutting a film property for television without buying out the original rights holders, an extension rather than a reboot.

Powell Is Busy Elsewhere, Even After a Stumble

Powell’s 2026 slate reads more like a producer’s slate than a leading man’s. The Hit Man series is the latest in a stretch of TV work that includes a straight-to-series order at Prime Video for Calamities, a Texas-set crime thriller, executive produced through BarnStorm. He is also an EP on A24’s upcoming Texas Chainsaw Massacre series, written by JT Mollner, and his Hulu comedy Chad Powers returns for a second season this fall. On the film side, he most recently headlined A24’s How to Make a Killing and voiced Fox McCloud in Illumination’s The Super Mario Galaxy Movie.

The wider slate, though, runs through a stumble. The Running Man, a $110 million Paramount reboot directed by Edgar Wright, opened on November 14, 2025 to $17 million domestic and $28.2 million global, a result the Running Man box office opening analysis from Deadline attributed to a marketing shake-up under new Paramount leadership and a box office that never found the audience Top Gun: Maverick had offered Powell. The film opened the same weekend as Lionsgate’s Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, which beat it on both domestic ($21.3 million) and global ($75.5 million) charts. By the next weekend, The Running Man‘s worldwide total sat below $50 million.

Powell’s recent box office, by film:

• Top Gun: Maverick (2022): $1.49 billion global
• Anyone But You (2023): $220 million global
• Twisters (2024): $372 million global
• The Running Man (2025): $28.2 million global opening; below $50 million global in two weekends

The frame Deadline offered the next day, from a source close to the production, was that the stumble was not a closing line on Powell’s leading-man bid:

Running Man shouldn’t be seen as a referendum that Glen Powell can’t open a movie.

A person close to The Running Man production told Deadline in November 2025. The same Deadline piece added that Powell “is known for rolling up his sleeves in the post process and pulling out the stops in the promotional tour; we’re told he’s an actor who cares about the ultimate outcome of his movies. It’s never over and done for Powell.” The same Deadline read pointed to a wider, more female-dominated audience turning out for Now You See Me 3, and to a release date Powell’s film had jumped around on in its final months.

How Hit Man Fits Netflix’s Adaptation Playbook

Netflix has spent the last two years turning its own movie library into series. The pattern is consistent: an acquisition or original that tested well with the service’s audience gets a small-screen extension, often with a different lead and the original producer team kept on for branding. To All the Boys I Loved Before became XO, Kitty, which recently released its third season. Extraction is becoming Mercenary, an eight-episode series set in the same continuity as the Chris Hemsworth films, with Omar Sy set to star as a mercenary in Libya.

Hit Man slots into that same playbook, with the unusual wrinkle that the original lead is one of the executive producers on the new show. Netflix is not the only streamer in the genre-extension business, but it is the most aggressive. The table below tracks the three known Netflix movie-to-TV adaptations:

Frequently Asked Questions

Will Glen Powell star in the new Hit Man Netflix series?

No. Powell is attached as an executive producer alongside Richard Linklater, with The Playlist reporting on June 12, 2026 that “the project won’t star Powell, but it’ll be inspired by the movie’s set-up of assumed undercover identities.” The lead role has not been cast.

Who is writing the Hit Man Netflix series?

Stephen Falk, the creator, executive producer, and showrunner of FXX’s You’re the Worst, which ran for five seasons from 2014 to 2019. His other TV credits include Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black, Showtime’s Weeds, and Apple TV’s Hello Tomorrow!, and he is repped by UTA.

What is the Hit Man Netflix series about?

Deadline reports the series will likely follow the movie’s premise of an unassuming police contractor, a college professor, who uses elaborate disguises and develops different characters to pose as a fake hitman and expose suspects looking to get someone killed. The premise draws a line to J.J. Abrams’ Alias, in which the protagonist also assumed multiple identities, and to Powell’s own Hulu series Chad Powers, where he wears prosthetics.

When did the original Hit Man movie come out, and what was it based on?

The film had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in fall 2023 and its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, where Netflix acquired it for $20 million. It was released on the streamer in June 2024. The screenplay by Linklater and Powell was adapted from a 2001 Texas Monthly article by Skip Hollandsworth about Gary Johnson, a real Houston-area police contractor who posed as a hit man to entrap suspects and was, per one Texas Monthly source, “the Laurence Olivier of the field.” For the film’s cast and release details, see the Hit Man cast list and June 2024 release notes on Netflix’s Tudum.

Is the new Hit Man series a remake or a spinoff?

Deadline describes the series as “inspired by” the 2024 film, not a direct remake, and CBR adds that it is unclear “if the project will be a true remake of the movie or exist in the same universe as it.” That structure would leave room for Powell or other film cast members to make guest appearances on the new show.