Update, August 6: There is now a contract-shaped reason DC circled and Netflix signed. The Paramount merger contract explains the entire Batman stall — Warner Bros. cannot offer locked long-term franchise deals on its own right now. Netflix can.
Alan Ritchson just got paid, and it wasn’t by a movie theater.
Following the monster success of War Machine, Ritchson has signed a first-look feature film deal with Netflix through his Dancing Skeleton banner, with the first project already locked: an untitled heist thriller set in the world of MotoGP that Ritchson will star in and produce, Deadline reports.
Chris Morgan, who wrote seven Fast & Furious movies and helped relaunch the franchise at Universal, is writing the script, and the team pitched the project to Netflix as “Fast & Furious with motorcycles.”
Joe Roth and Jeff Kirschenbaum of RK Films produce alongside Morgan and Ainsley Morgan, with Kirschenbaum having been the Universal exec who oversaw the Fast relaunch before moving into producing. MotoGP itself has signed on to consult on the film’s development.
The story follows a crew of motorcycle thieves pulling antiquities heists around the globe, with Interpol recruiting a onetime MotoGP prodigy — Ritchson — to run them down, only for him to discover the crew’s ringleader might be his younger brother, long believed dead.
None of this came out of nowhere, either. Ritchson told Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert just days ago that he personally acquired the MotoGP rights: “I want to make a cool, Fast and Furious kind of thing for motorcycles.”
Netflix Is Where Ritchson’s Audience Lives
War Machine is the reason the check got written. The flick racked up 139.9 million views in its first 91 days after hitting Netflix in March — good for the No. 10 spot on the streamer’s all-time Most Popular Movies list — and a sequel is already in the works.
Ritchson also recently boarded Maelstrom from Carry-On director Jaume Collet-Serra, playing a federal marshal stuck guarding an arms dealer’s fiancée as a hurricane and a wave of mercenaries close in, and he’s fronting and producing an untitled survival competition series for the streamer with Bunim/Murray. Under the new pact, Ritchson will star in and produce a slate of features for Netflix on top of all that.
Motor City Bombs With $2.4 Million
Now for the timing, because it’s brutal. The Netflix deal lands just ten days after Ritchson’s theatrical release, Motor City, cratered at the box office.
The 1970s Detroit revenge thriller — the nearly dialogue-free one from director Potsy Ponciroli, costarring Shailene Woodley, Ben Foster, Pablo Schreiber and Ben McKenzie — opened July 24 in around 1,600 theaters to just $1.69 million.
Per Box Office Mojo, it now sits at $2.28 million domestic and $2.41 million worldwide, with a grand total of $133,021 coming from overseas. The reported production budget: $30 million.
Motor City premiered at Venice back in August 2025, with IFC picking up domestic rights for a reported $4 million, and then it sat on the shelf for eleven months before opening against The Odyssey‘s third weekend.
So the scoreboard reads: 139.9 million views on Netflix, $2.4 million in theaters. Alan Ritchson is a movie star — the movies just happen to live on your TV.
So Much For Batman?
Worth remembering what else was happening the week Motor City opened: the DCU Batman circus.
On release day, July 24, Ritchson sat with Josh Horowitz, went speechless when asked if he is playing Batman, confirmed “a lot” of conversations with James Gunn, and signed off the interview with a “detective” clue.
Two days later at Comic-Con, he told the Reacher panel he does not think Batman is in the cards and that his DC conversations are about another character.
And on July 29, Gunn declared on Threads that the DCU Batman hasn’t been cast at all.
As I exclusively reported, Ritchson is a frontrunner on Gunn’s Batman board for a bigger, older, darker Dark Knight, but a frontrunner is not a contract, and Ritchson told Comic-Con he is booked solid through 2028.
This Netflix deal just made that calendar tighter.
Meanwhile, per my reporting, the Paramount board wants Gunn and Peter Safran out once the merger closes, so by the time Ritchson’s schedule opens up, the people running DC may not be the people he has been talking to.
DC spent a year circling Alan Ritchson. Netflix signed him. That’s the whole story.
Up next, Reacher Season 4 premieres August 12 on Prime Video, with Season 5 already in production.
