Richard Linklater's Movie 'Hit Man,' With Glen Powell, Sells to Netflix for $20M

NEW YORK (AP) The Toronto International Film Festival may be over but it's biggest sale has just gone through. Netflix has acquired Richard Linklater's Hit Man, starring Glen Powell, for $20 million.

Hit Man, which Linklater and Powell co-wrote, stars the Top Gun: Maverick actor as a New Orleans psychology professor who also works undercover posing as a hit man for the police in sting operations to catch would-be murders. The film, a comic, existential riff on the hit-man genre, was one of the breakout hits of TIFF, which concluded Sunday.

Netflix didn't announce release plans yet for Hit Man, which also played at the Venice Film Festival. The film, which co-stars Adria Arjona as a wife who wants her husband dead, is loosely based on a true story detailed in a Skip Hollandsworth-written Texas Monthly article from 2001 about faux-hit-man Gary Johnson.