This August, Ryan Reynolds will star in a video game film ‘Free Guy’

It may not feature Ryan Reynolds re-enacting Deadpool, but based on the debut teaser for Free Guy, we can anticipate plenty of the meta-jokes he’s almost turned into a personal brand.

Shawn Levy is directing Free Guy, an upcoming American science fiction action comedy film based on a screenplay by Matt Lieberman and Zak Penn and a narrative by Lieberman. Ryan Reynolds, Jodie Comer, Lil Rel Howery, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Joe Keery, and Taika Waititi will be featured in the film.

Free Guy will be released theatrically in the United States on August 13, 2021, by 20th Century Studios. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, its release date has been put back three times since July 2020.

Guy (Reynolds) is a non-player character (NPC) in the open-world video game Free City who works as a bank teller. Guy becomes self-aware of his world is a video game and takes steps to make himself the hero, creating a race against time to save the game before the developers shut it down, thanks to a program developed by programmers Millie (Comer) and Keys (Keery) and inserted into Free City by publisher Antwan (Waititi).

(Image source: gadgets.ndtv.com)

It is inspired by extremely violent open-world video games such as Grand Theft Auto, Free Guy follows a non-playable background character in a video game who is roused from his regular bank teller routine and entrusted with protecting his video game world from destruction. It’s like The Truman Show Meets Wreck-It Ralph, with a dash of Last Action Hero and The Matrix tossed in for good measure. So a lot is going on here, but it’s in a good manner. There will be lots of severe video game-style violence as well as some filthy humor.