In news that probably won’t do much work in stopping all the non-pop-culture-obsessed people in our lives from squinting and going “Which one is Glen Powell?” every time we try to bring his name up, the Chad Powers star has just decided to make yet another streaming series—this one, apparently, in a strictly behind the scenes capacity. Specifically, Powell has signed on as an executive producer on Calamities, a new Prime Video series he’s working on with with Hunters creator David Weil.
And while the 37-year-old actor-writer-producer might disagree, this does feel like another data point in our evolving theory that Powell is attempting to apply video game speedrunning techniques to a standard Hollywood ascent. (Possibly even a tool-assisted speedrun, if we count “handsome face, only occasionally obscured by bad wigs and prosthetics,” as a tool.) We’re just saying: Going from “fifth-billed guy in the unlikely mega-hit Top Gun sequel” to “able to executive produce TV shows while basically manifesting your own roles in the biggest movies of the year to date” in the span of just five years is some pretty on-pace work.
Anyway: Calamities is the latest show from Weil, who hasn’t had a slow rise himself. His first major TV work, Nazi-seeking series Hunters, ran for two seasons on Prime Video from 2020 to 2023, but was apparently well-received enough that his project Citadel got tapped as the thing that Joe and Anthony Russo decided to spend all their “Hey, we made the planet’s biggest movie, let us do whatever we want” clout on. (Weil also served as showrunner for the flagship Citadel show, putting his work in front of the literally dozens of people who actually watched the planet-spanning spy series.) As for Calamities itself, it sounds slightly less global in scope: Per THR, the show centers on “a quiet border town” caught in the crossfire between a small-town sheriff, the FBI, and a ruthless drug cartel. No word on who’ll be starring in the series, except that Glen Powell apparently won’t be, which narrows the total possibility space down to roughly 8.3 billion people, minus one. The series has received a direct-to-series order from Prime.
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