How ‘Nobody 2’s Powerhouse Producers Win In Hollywood In Tough Times

(Left to right) 87North’s David Leitch and Kelly McCormick in Paris on July 18, 2022.

AFP via Getty Images

“When we’re in love with something like Nobody, and we get a green light on it, it’s hard to say no,” admits producer David Leitch as we chat over Zoom just days ahead of action sequel Nobody 2 landing in theaters. “Those green lights are hard to come by, and they’re getting harder and harder, so we’ve been fortunate that we are in demand and we’re taking advantage of that.”

He and his producer wife, Kelly McCormick, are the powerhouse pair behind 87 North Productions, the world-renowned production and action design company behind such crowdpleasers as Bullet Train, Violent Night, The Fall Guy, and the original Nobody.

“We love to work,” he continues. “We are grateful to be where we are in the business, where we have a lot of opportunities to make stuff.” Leitch and McCormick, who are married, have found a small window behind night shoots on another movie to discuss R-rated Nobody 2. Days later, they’re heading to kick off production on Violent Night 2.

Times are challenging in Hollywood, but 87North is weathering the storm brilliantly. Leitch, a former stuntman who directed Atomic Blonde and Deadpool 2, credits McCormick as a significant reason for that.

“When you look at other companies that are in our genre of action filmmaking, there isn’t an iconic producer that rises to the top like there used to be back in the Bruckheimer days. I think she’s making a play for it,” he enthuses. “Kelly is definitely this incredible producer who can run multiple projects at any given time and still add production savvy and tons of creative input on our big movies that we do, but also the smaller genre films that we produce for Universal, so she’s the rock star that keeps it all together.”

“If we didn’t have someone as skilled at it as her, it would be hard for our production company to stay afloat, and we wouldn’t be able to do the volume that we do and have the quality that we have.”

Nobody 2 sees Bob Odenkirk reprise the role of Hutch Mansell, a suburban dad who also happens to be a former lethal assassin. The sequel has him and his family heading off on vacation for some quality time together, but, as usual, where Hutch goes, trouble is not far behind, and what appears to be a sleepy town turns out to be a hotbed of organized criminal activity. The ensemble cast also includes Connie Nielsen, Sharon Stone, Colin Hanks, Christopher Lloyd, and RZA.

The first film made $57.5 million against a $16 million budget, with critics and audiences giving it the thumbs up. That success meant Nobody 2 had $25 million to spend, but it wasn’t something they had expected.

“These days, getting a sequel doesn’t necessarily mean getting a bigger budget,” McCormick admits. “In all the sequels that we hope to do, it’s about thinking about the character, but also where the audience might want to go with them. That’s what was our North Star here.”

“We didn’t start work on Nobody 2 immediately after the first film, in the sense that we weren’t expecting a sequel. Our first thoughts on what could happen next were a vacation. In the first film, they talk about going to Italy one time and how special it was. We talked about going to Italy, and then we pivoted and thought, ‘You know what? He’s such a middle American hero, why doesn’t he go to a destination in middle America and have that experience, rather than what you would expect of a globe-trotting sequel?’ It kept it super grounded.”

Leitch And McCormick’s 87North Has Created Landmark Moments In Hollywood

Nobody was considered a barometer of the industry. Landing in theaters in March 2021, it was one of the first big studio movies to drop after the pandemic. Its success was a landmark moment. Leitch and McCormick only founded 87North in 2019.

“We released the first one as people were coming back to the theaters after COVID. Shockingly, people came,” McCormick exclaims. “When we’re talking to people, a lot of them are like, ‘That was my first movie back after the pandemic,’ and it’s a cool thing to have for that film. After the theaters, it continued to play well, and people found it so that as those numbers started stacking up, it was like, ‘Let’s just see where we might go and get a script going.’ Bob’s been really busy, and to get it right took a minute, so we just wanted to take our time. It’s probably within a year of its release that we started working on it. It was a long development process.”

ForbesDarth Vader’s Lightsaber Is Expected To Fetch $3 Million At AuctionBy Simon Thompson

Although both Nobody’s are very Midwest American movies, they were filmed in Canada and have had international directors. Hardcore Henry’s Ilya Naishuller helmed the original, with Indonesian director Timo Tjahjanto making his English-language feature debut for the second entry in what has become a franchise.

“We have been dying to work with Timo, and he hadn’t quite found his moment in the American English language market. He had done a bunch of stuff on Netflix, but it was local language,” McCormick explains. “He is such an interesting and bold filmmaker. We developed Nobody 2 with a different director. When we got our greenlight, he received one for another movie at the same time, and he had to make a tough decision. I love the kid, but he put me in a bit of a spot. We were something like eight weeks out with a green light, and we had to find a director.”

ForbesJoaquin Phoenix Headed To New Mexico To Find His ‘Eddington’ CharacterBy Simon Thompson

Leith interjects, “We had been developing another project with Timo, but we said, ‘Hey, you want to jump on Nobody?'”

“I was like, ‘Who would work for this for the studio, for Bob, and us? Who is that guy?’ Timo is game, he’s a shooter, he loves to get behind the camera, and he’ll just run with something and make it better, but also be thoughtful about what we’ve already got going,” McCormick continues. “There was really only one candidate, and thank God he said yes. Then we had to handle his international visa; we were rewriting so that it felt like his movie too, and then somehow we got into production without even stretching the schedule. I don’t know how we did that. I think it has a lot to do with Timo as a collaborator, because he understands the team, and he jumped in and put his own special sauce on it. That’s exactly what we needed.”

“It’s something David has done because he jumped into Deadpool 2 and jumped into Hobbs and Shaw. Those feel like the franchises they originated, but they definitely have a patina of a Leitchian movie, and I think that Timo did that in spades on Nobody 2. He’s a dream and we’d love to work with him again.”

Having already filmed multiple movies this year under the 87North banner and with more things to make before the end of 2025, Leith and McCormick are on a roll. However, the film industry is still in a weird place with unstable box office returns and theater attendance remaining below pre-pandemic levels. So what do they make of the state of the industry right now? Nobody seems to know.

“Neither do we, but I don’t know if you ever did. It has always been a wild, untangible data collection industry, and the moment they say, ‘Oh, everything’s a disaster in the theater,’ is the moment when some surprise happens,” McCormick concludes. “For us, the goal is to keep our heads down, experience and feel the gratefulness of getting to do stuff, push for the right movie at the right time, whether that be like IP-driven or original, and to try to make the best movie possible, and believe in that. That will either make it pop at the box office or sustain to the point that our partners will profit as well, and keep the mark of our 87North brand strong too.”