“Carry-On” has taken off on Netflix.
The ticking-clock thriller, which stars Taron Egerton as a TSA agent who is blackmailed by a psychopath (played, with eely slipperiness by Jason Bateman) into letting a suspicious piece of luggage get onto a plane, has amassed 42 million views and was the biggest opening for a Netflix film this year. It was #1 movie on the streaming platform for in America and was a top 10 movie in 93 countries. It even got a shoutout from the actual TSA.
And it success is even sweeter for director Jaume Collet-Serra, the Spanish-American filmmaker who has made claustrophobic, tightly wound thrillers, like “Non-Stop” and “The Shallows.” His last two movies, though, saw him veer into the world of big budget, high concept Hollywood product – Disney’s “Jungle Cruise” and Warner Bros.’ “Black Adam.” The movies themselves were serviceable (a sequel was even announced for “Jungle Cruise”) but they lacked what made Collet-Serra’s films so special – the everyman (or -woman) caught in an oversized situation and an uncanny mastery of suspense set pieces.
Thankfully, “Carry-On” puts him right back where he should be.
“I’m not going to stop doing the thrillers,” Collet-Serra said. “I’m always trying to do ‘Die Hard’ over and over again. I’m getting closer now. I love like the regular character in extraordinary circumstances. I love the one location. I like this mystery where the character has to find out a lot of procedural stuff. I like the ensemble of characters.” And it’s true – “Carry-On,” with its Christmastime setting, gang of colorful terrorists and average dude caught up in a much bigger situation, he is closer to “Carry-On” than he has ever been before.
Collet-Serra said he also loved learning “about a world I know nothing about,” something he brought to “Carry-On” with the minutiae of how the TSA works.
As for those bigger movies that he had just made, Collet-Serra is thankful for the experience. “What those movies gave me was the confidence in visual effects,” Collet-Serra said, pointing to a scene in “Carry-On” where Egerton gets into a fight in the baggage sorting area of the airport. Without the experience on “Black Adam” and “Jungle Cruise,” he would have never been able to stage – and realize – that sequence. (There’s also an elaborate oner during a car chase that is better viewed than talked about. That too was greatly aided by the knowledge he gained while on those big studio movies.)
“With a movie on this budget, normally people will be like, ‘You’re crazy, don’t even try it.’ But with my experience of having done it, I know,” Collet-Serra said. Not that it helps that much. Collet-Serra is quick to note that learning things on movies only applies if you’re doing the same movie again. But you never do. “Once you move on, what you’ve learned doesn’t really apply entirely the same way, because it’s a different movie, different crew, different situations. You try to keep evolving,” Collet-Serra said.
Collet-Serra admits to feeling a little lost on movies of that size and complexity. “No one can explain to you what it means to do those movies until you do them. Every movie, you have a natural progression – you go from a little horror to a little bit of a bigger budget, and you start evolving certain things in the genre,” Collet-Serra said. “When you do a big movie like that, there’s really no natural progression. There’s just quantum physics. Bbut once you’ve done it, that’s great, because that’s what every director wants to know. At least me, I want to know that I have experience of doing everything. I keep always looking for movies that challenge me, in all ways.”
While it might look like “Carry-On” is the director purposefully pivoting away from the big budget studio thing, he insists that he is always overlapping movies. He was prepping “Carry-On” while finishing “Black Adam.” Currently he is finishing his new Blumhouse movie “The Woman in the Yard” while shooting a new version of “Cliffhanger” (this one with Lily James and Pierce Brosnan). “I was certainly looking to get back into my wheelhouse of these thrillers, even before ‘Black Adam.’ Those movies took a long time, and not just because they’re big, but there was a pandemic in between,” Collet-Serra said. The filmmaker likes to shoot a lot. Spending three years on a single movie was not something he was used to or particularly fond of.
As to what drew him to “Carry-On,” Collet-Serra said, “the concept that the main character has to do nothing to save his loved one.” He elaborated: “Normally, like they put your loved one in danger, and they say, ‘Go do this.’ In this case, your job really is so simple. He can just let him go through with the simplest of actions. It’s just not raising his right, not pushing the button. That, to me, was very relatable.” He also appreciated that the movie was about “young people or people who are at that stage in their life that they don’t love their job, they’re not passionate. They have they know they have the potential, but they haven’t really failed. They really haven’t succeeded. They haven’t had any real test. Having that thriller with the pressure in like one day, in a few hours, to take this character and really test him, was exciting as well.”
In terms of casting Bateman, a likable personal known mostly for comedies, as the villains, Collet-Serra said it came after his frequent collaborator Michael Green did a pass on T.J. Fixman’s original script, in particular honing the dialogue and the mysterious character that Bateman would eventually play (known only as Traveler). “We needed somebody who could do both – I’m not saying that the comedy and the drama, but he could turn quickly. And he didn’t need to prove that he was intelligent at every moment; you just had that feeling,” said Collet-Serra. “When a bad guy is really smart, the less they do, the scarier they become. Because every choice, every little thing, is so logical and ruthless.” After sending him the script, Collet-Serra said, Bateman immediately signed on. “Jason really loves playing that very pragmatic, you know, this is the way the world works character,” Collet-Serra said.
“Carry-On” is notable for being one of the first projects in the partnership between Steven Spielberg’s Amblin and Netflix. Collet-Serra had worked with Amblin on a pair of TV projects, directing episodes of the found-footage mystery series “The River” and “Reverie” (we had to look that one up – it involves virtual reality). Still, working with Spielberg is always a thrill. Collet-Serra said that “Back to the Future,” produced by Spielberg, is probably his second-favorite movie after “Die Hard.”
“He gave great notes and, and, but I think that my style is already something that he likes, in the sense that I’m very clear on what is happening geographically and what the character needs to go through and the rules and the logic and all those things that are so important in these kinds of movies,” Collet-Serra. “That was a great experience, as always.” Spielberg provided crucial notes at the beginning of the process that informed the rest of the movie, Collet-Serra said. Because of course Spielberg did. How could he not?
Collet-Serra currently filming a Sylvester Stallone-free reboot of “Cliffhanger,” which he is hesitant to talk too much about but said that they have been in the mountains in Austria and Germany, that he’s learned a lot about climbing and is “having a blast.” (Collet-Serra skirted the question when we asked if the “Jungle Cruise” sequel is still happening.)
But before “Cliffhanger,” Collet-Serra’s Blumhouse movie “The Woman in the Yard” is coming, with Universal Pictures releasing the film on March 28, 2025. Collet-Serra was brought onto the project by “Carry-On” star Danielle Deadwyler. “I’ve been a fan of Blumhouse and we’ve been trying to do something together for a long time and it was just such a quick thing that fit in and it was ready to go.” He describes the project, whose plot details are still very much under wraps, as “a very different movie from anything that I’ve ever done.”
And maybe that’s the biggest swing away from the big studio movies he’s made – a low budget (most Blumhosue productions are around $10 million), quickly produced thriller without massive movie star egos, consumer product commitments, promotional tie-ins or huge overhead.
Not so, said Collet-Serra.
“None of my movies like they felt like there was any change in the experience. I don’t think resources define the movie because more resources are matching the expectation and the complexity of things. At the end of the day, you can do the movie in 25 days, 30 days, if the movie is made for that. If you’re only have a few actors in one location, then it’s very doable. But if you have to destroy the world, then you might not be able to do it in 20 days or 30 days,” Collet-Serra said. “The people that I work with, they’ve been with me across all these movies. I keep working with the same talented people, so I don’t feel the difference. At the end of the day, that’s what it is.”
“Carry-On” is on Netflix right now.
