One would hope that the first on-screen pairing of John Cena and David Harbour—two well-known actors who’ve made a career of playing big fellas in big action movies—might involve a missing diamond or an international cabal of car thieves, or anything that plays to their mutual strengths as action stars and comic talents. That’s what makes their first team-up sound so interesting: Per Deadline, Cena and Harbour will team up for The Family Disappears, a thriller-comedy (or comedy-thriller, we can’t say for sure) from Jonatan Etzler, director of the recent dark comedy Bad Apples, starring Bond villain hopeful Saoirse Ronan. While the film likely won’t be about an elite bank robber or shady global conglomerate (we assume, anyway), The Family Disappears does boast a premise that offers plenty for the burly actors to gnaw on.
The Family Disappears will be produced by Nick Weidenfeld and Alexis Garcia, who worked on the demented A24 buddy comedy Friendship with Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd. Deadline suggests Disappears will function “thematically and perhaps tonally” with Friendship and also HBO’s DTF St. Louis, for which Harbour recently won an Emmy. This suggests to us that Cena and Harbour better stretch a bit before their characters inevitably fracture and swear blood vengeance on each other over some perceived slight, or develop toxic yet fun relationships with their mistresses due to a pitiful mid-life crisis, or something to that effect. According to the film’s description, we may not be totally off-base:
“Based on an original script by Brendan O’Hare with thriller undertones, The Family Disappears follows an overworked dad who returns from a work trip to find his family has disappeared and a mysterious newcomer has bought and moved into their home.”
So before we privately run through the presumably violent and/or funny permutations of what might happen when said overworked dad (Harbour, maybe) comes home to find said “mysterious newcomer” (Cena, probably) stretching out on his couch where his beloved family used to sit, Deadline is reporting that Atlanta production for The Family Disappears is expected to begin on November 10. See, we went through the whole news item without mentioning Peacemaker or Red Guardian once; superhero movies haven’t broken all of our brains. (Peacemaker Vs. Red Guardian show, though–could you imagine?)
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