Mayday Sends Its 80s Buddy Comedy Straight to Streaming

Apple TV’s Mayday arrives September 4 with Ryan Reynolds as a downed Navy pilot and Kenneth Branagh as the ex-KGB man who hides him. It is a 1980s buddy comedy shot like a theatrical, then parked on a streamer two months after America’s 250th birthday.

The film wants Kenny Loggins, bootleg fighter-pilot tapes, and a cabin papered in USA junk. The press tour wants credit for calling that decade scary. Both things are now on the same poster.

A Navy Pilot Walks Into a KGB Fan’s Cabin

In 1987, Lieutenant Troy “Assassin” Kelly draws a secret hop over Soviet territory and does not come home clean. Apple’s own synopsis puts Reynolds in a Navy flight suit and Branagh in the doorway as Nikolai Ustinov, a former KGB man with a taste for American junk culture, who patches Troy up instead of turning him in.

Troy would rather crawl out alone. Nik keeps saving him anyway, and the longer that lasts, the less of a future Nik has in his own country. Maria Bakalova plays Anna Ustinov, the daughter Nik wants to get out. Marcin Dorociński is Alexander Volkov, the KGB officer on their trail. David Morse is Harold Kelly, Troy’s sick father waiting back home.

Writer-directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, the pair behind Game Night and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, frame it as a mismatched-buddy chase, not a history lesson. Sight gags and slow burns do most of the work. Reynolds can fire a quip half-asleep. The surprise is Branagh, who plays Nik as a true believer in burgers, cassettes, and a certain 1986 flight-school movie he has worn out on tape.

Nik’s house is the joke and the thesis at once. The walls do the saluting so the script does not have to speechify every minute.

NIK’S AMERICA STASH

• The tapes: A bootleg of the 1986 flight-school hit gets heavy play, and Nik quotes it after too many viewings.
• The stereo: Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. cassette does regular work, and Kenny Loggins is in the rotation.
• The merch: USA souvenirs cover the isolated house, down to fast-food icons Troy would have walked past without a second look.

Daley and Goldstein are not hiding the toy box. They are counting on viewers who still want it, and on two leads who can make the odd-couple math feel newly found rather than traced.

Apple Kept This Crowd Movie on the App

Apple Original Films, Skydance, and Reynolds’s Maximum Effort made Mayday as an Apple original, and the company says it premieres globally on September 4. Skydance’s David Ellison produced it with Dana Goldberg and Don Granger. Ashley Fox and Johnny Pariseau produced for Maximum Effort, with Reynolds, George Dewey, and John G. Scotti as executive producers.

That is a theatrical-scale roster for a film you will watch the film on Apple TV from the couch. Apple already put F1, which it calls the highest-grossing sports feature of all time, into cinemas. Mayday, built out of aerial gags, a missile convoy, and two movie stars, stays inside the app. The service costs $14.99 a month, with a seven-day trial, and Apple says it reaches over 100 countries on 1 billion screens.

Daley and Goldstein’s last big swing as directors did not have that problem. Honor Among Thieves opened in U.S. theaters on March 31, 2023, ran 2 hours 14 minutes, and took in $205.5 million worldwide. Mayday is shorter, later, and locked to a login.

TWO DALEY AND GOLDSTEIN COMEDIES

Early notices already groused that this one belonged on a cinema screen. The complaint writes itself once you see the jet work and the Moscow car chaos. Apple still chose the quieter Friday, two months after July 4, 2026, when a flag-waving 1987 comedy would have had a national party to lean on.

https://x.com/AppleTV/status/2077015297605652604

Apple sold the pairing as “a friendship with major red flags.” That line is funnier than the release plan. The movie is a crowd picture. The plan is a living-room picture.

What Daley and Goldstein Wanted From Top Gun

Daley and Goldstein have said they were not trying to remake the 1986 flight-school smash, and not trying to mock it either. They wanted the aftertaste, the fandom, the way a certain kind of American still sees that movie’s hero as both the official icon and the rule-breaker. Then they wanted to strand that man in a forest where charm and throttle cannot finish the job.

How do you take that iconic figure and turn it on its head a little bit by putting him in a situation where he can’t solve every problem, where he actually needs the enemy, to save his butt.

Jonathan Goldstein, co-writer and co-director

Goldstein also pointed at James Bond as the other boyhood model, the almost-superhero who is still a person, and said that is the gear Branagh is working in. Daley, who grew up on 1980s clothes and radio, pushed that look through costume designer Debra McGuire, who worked with him on Freaks & Geeks and Game Night. He talked about playing the decade from two sides: neon San Diego on one end, a greyer Soviet street that recalls the 1950s on the other.

They did homework on gadgets too. Goldstein said the Altai satellite phone the pair hunt down was a real piece of kit, and that they tried to keep the tradecraft inside what 1987 could actually do. Volkov, in their telling, is not a cartoon heavy. Daley said they searched a long time for Dorociński because he could play a KGB officer who wants Gorbachev’s glasnost rolled back without twirling a mustache, a man who is charming, readable, and slightly off. Goldstein added, because of course he did, that Dorociński is a ping-pong killer on weekends.

Reynolds, promoting the film, went darker than the cassette collection on Nik’s shelf. He said 1980s nostalgia “paves over all the trauma” of a “tumultuous” decade, and that people now shrug the years off as a flight movie and cocaine when “it was really scary.” That is a fair thought for a seminar. It is a strange sales pitch for a movie whose Russian hero has turned his dacha into a gift shop.

The gap is the tell. Mayday on screen is burgers, mixtapes, and a Navy cockiness that still thinks it can walk out of Russia. The interviews keep reaching for a warning label. Viewers who were actually awake in 1987 can smell the difference, and a Canadian movie star lecturing them about the Cuban Missile Crisis is not going to close it.

Nik Treats America Like a Religion

The political read some viewers will bring in is already baked into the premise. Nik defected in his heart long before he defected in fact. He did it by eating the exports, the songs, the merch, the idea that a person might choose a life. Troy, for his part, says communism “flies in the face of human nature” early on, which is about as subtle as a carrier landing, and the film does not pretend otherwise.

Daley and Goldstein still try to keep Russian civilians from turning into a single snarling mass. The script’s gentler point is that people under a hard system are still people, and that the funny part is the culture clash, not a body count. Bakalova’s Anna is written as Nik’s lesbian daughter, a subplot the film uses to sketch the United States as the more tolerant exit, then gets out of the way of the chase.

Morse’s father scenes are the small bruise. Troy’s home front is not a victory parade. An ailing dad is the closest the movie comes to telling American viewers they are not perfect, and it is a brief stop, not the engine. The engine is Branagh in a beard, loving a country that would not know what to do with him, while Reynolds does the wounded-hotshot bit he could play in his sleep and, somehow, still makes land.

It took a Canadian lead and a British co-star to deliver that salute. The directors are American. The check was Apple’s. If you came looking for a studio system that still greenlights this tone without a streamer attached, you will not find it in the credits.

French Jets and a Missile That Would Not Fit

The throwback look is not all needle drops. Barry Peterson, who also shot Honor Among Thieves, is on camera. Colin Stetson wrote the score. Filming began in Montreal on March 4, 2024, and wrapped May 8 under the working title Blackbird, after a June 2023 announcement that Reynolds and Branagh were circling the leads. Bakalova, Dorociński, and others joined in April 2024. The trailer finally dropped July 14, 2026, a long hang for a comedy this light on its feet.

They did not get the U.S. Navy. Daley said the production spent a month on aerial photography in the south of France before principal photography, flying French fighter jets and reskinning them in post to read as F-18s, using some of the same practical tricks Joseph Kosinski used on the 2022 sequel to that 1986 flight film. Wikipedia’s plot sheet also puts Troy in a Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird that meets a MiG-29 the hard way, which is a lot of airplane for a movie that still has to get laughs in a cabin.

The ground unit was heavier. Goldstein said they found a man in Hungary who collected Soviet Cold War hardware, including an ICBM launch trailer. The team built a fake missile for the top. The whole thing weighed many tons, crawled from point to point, and dumped smoke on takes they did not always want. In Budapest, crews had to raise power lines because the vehicle would not fit under them.

THE ROAD TO SEPTEMBER 4

1. June 2023: Apple and Skydance announce Mayday, with Daley and Goldstein writing and directing and Reynolds producing through Maximum Effort.
2. March 4, 2024: Cameras roll in Montreal under the name Blackbird.
3. May 8, 2024: Principal photography wraps, then the film sits while Apple lines up a date.
4. July 14, 2026: The official trailer goes out, with a Neil Diamond needle drop selling the joke in two and a half minutes.
5. September 3, 2026: Reynolds and Branagh walk a red carpet the night before the app drop.
6. September 4, 2026: Mayday goes live on Apple TV, rated PG-13, running 1 hour 50 minutes.

That is a lot of metal and waiting for a Friday night stream. The scale is the leftover proof that someone, at some point, thought this might play to a room full of strangers eating popcorn.

An 84 Percent Score Meets a Quiet Friday

Rotten Tomatoes has Mayday at 84 percent from 25 reviews, with no audience score posted yet. Metacritic, using a weighted average, has it at 58 out of 100 from 15 critics, which it files as mixed or average. Those two numbers can live together. A lot of notices like the two-hander and shrug at the rest.

WHERE THE NOTICES SPLIT

• The fans of the pair: Frank Scheck called the popcorn diverting because of the mismatched-buddy chemistry, and Brian Tallerico said the film mostly works on fluid direction plus Branagh, who is rarely asked to be this funny and this physical at once.
• The cold shoulder: Monica Castillo graded it D+ and said the retro jokes never figure out how to make the era funny, while Nick Schager dismissed it as a mirthless mess whose 1980s politics are as lousy as Reynolds’s one-liners.
• The uneasy middle: Lindsey Bahr found it pretty fun in slick wrapping and still called it a strange time to joke about Russia and geopolitical tension.

Branagh is the critic-proof element. He does deadpan, devotion, and sudden violence without begging for the set piece, and more than one person who sat through it walked out talking about him, not the Canadian in the flight suit. Reynolds is Reynolds, which is either the reason you showed up or the reason you will mute the quips. The action, by several accounts, is sharper than a streaming comedy needs to be, with an ejection that turns into burning silk and later car wreckage around Moscow that aims for old Bond excess.

Family notes are ordinary for the rating: comic violence, some strong language, mature themes. It is not a kids’ picture and not a grim one. It is a 1 hour 50 minute original that wants to feel like 1987 without asking you to leave the house in 2026.

The red carpet was September 3. The movie itself lands the next night, on Apple TV, with no ticket stub and no crowd laugh to tell you when a gag worked. For a film this fond of packed rooms, Walkmans, and a country that used to put this stuff on 2,000 screens, that is the last joke, and nobody in Nik’s cabin is in on it.