Russell Crowe in The WeightImage via Vertical Entertainment
2026 has been a relatively quiet year for Russell Crowe, but his new movie coming out this week could change how it’s remembered in the wider scope of his career. Crowe is fresh off a successful year in 2025 when he starred in Nuremberg, the WWII legal thriller that grossed nearly $75 million at the box office before also going on to become one of the most-watched movies of the year on Netflix. Crowe began the year by starring in Beast, the MMA thriller that struggled at the box office before beginning a moderately successful run on Starz. Crowe also starred in a new action movie, The Get Out, which is now available to watch on Paramount+, and the film has already had one run into the global top 10.
Russell Crowe is now more than 20 years removed from his last Oscar nomination, but that isn’t stopping him from seeking out new hits across various genres. Crowe’s next film arrives this Friday when he teams up with Ethan Hawke for The Weight, which also stars Julia Jones and Austin Amelio. As if the hype couldn’t get any higher for the Russell Crowe and Ethan Hawke team-up, the movie already holds a 92% score from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, making it one of the highest-rated movies of the entire year. The Weight is only expected to debut in select theaters this weekend starting September 18, but don’t be surprised if it puts up solid box office numbers — Crowe may not be the draw he once was, but the pairing with Ethan Hawke and strong reviews will be enough for some fans to take a trip to the theater.
Collider Exclusive · Action Franchise Quiz
What Action Series Would You Thrive In?
Wick · Fast · Mission · Die Hard
Four franchises. Four completely different ideas of what a hero is: the assassin with a code, the family that never leaves anyone behind, the man who does his own stunts, and the guy who simply refuses to die. Only one of them runs on your particular brand of trouble. Eight questions will tell you which one you would survive.
🐕Wick
🏁Fast
🧨Mission
🎄Die Hard
FIND YOUR FRANCHISE →
01
How does a room know you’ve walked into it?
Every action hero arrives differently. Some of them arrive before they arrive.
ASomeone recognises me, and the temperature in the room drops without a single word being said.
BLoudly and warmly. I arrive with my people, and we’re already laughing about something.
CI’m the one who told everybody where to stand. I walked this room twice before anyone else arrived.
DBy accident. I wasn’t supposed to be here, and now I’m the only one who can do anything about it.
NEXT QUESTION →
02
It turns physical. What does your fighting actually look like?
Choreography is character. Yours says something about you.
AEconomical and devastating. Trained technique, no wasted motion, finished before most people notice it started.
BLoud, heavy and weirdly joyful. I’m not elegant, I hit like a truck, and I always have backup.
CTo plan, until the plan breaks. Then I improvise at full sprint and refuse to stop moving.
DBadly, honestly, and with a lot of swearing. I take more damage than I deal and I still don’t go down.
NEXT QUESTION →
03
Who is standing beside you when it starts?
Some franchises are built on a team. Others are built on one person walking in alone.
ANobody. I have contacts, favours and people who owe me, but when it begins I work alone.
BEveryone. My people are the entire point, and I’d trade the whole mission for any one of them.
CA small hand-picked team I trust completely, and I’d still take the worst part of the job myself.
DA voice on the other end of a radio and a building full of people who don’t know I exist.
NEXT QUESTION →
04
It has gone badly wrong. What keeps you upright?
Act two exists to find out what you’re actually made of.
AFocus, commitment and sheer will. Grief is fuel if you point it in the right direction.
BThe people counting on me. I don’t appear to have a limit when it’s family on the line.
CRefusing to accept the odds. Somebody has to do the impossible part, and it’s going to be me.
DSpite, mostly. And a growing sense that these people picked the wrong building.
NEXT QUESTION →
05
There’s a vehicle. What are you driving, and how?
No action franchise has ever survived without a car chase. This one is yours.
AA black muscle car I am unreasonably attached to, and I will dismantle an entire empire over it.
BSomething impossibly modified, at impossible speed, off an impossible ramp. Physics is a suggestion.
CA motorbike at full throttle through a city I memorised last night. And then off a cliff.
DA borrowed car, badly, while somebody in the passenger seat politely asks me to slow down.
NEXT QUESTION →
06
How do you feel about the people giving the orders?
There is always an institution. There is rarely a good one.
AThere are rules and I respect them absolutely, right up until somebody breaks one against me.
BI don’t take orders. I take care of people, and everything else tends to sort itself out.
CI serve the mission, not the memo. If my people are in danger, the orders come second.
DThey’re in a van outside telling me what I’m doing wrong while I’m the one bleeding on broken glass.
NEXT QUESTION →
07
Underneath all of it, what are you actually doing this for?
The stunts are the reason people come. This is the reason they stay.
ASomething was taken from me that can’t be replaced, and I’ve been settling that account ever since.
BBelonging. I built a family out of people who had nowhere else, and I’ll defend it with everything.
CThe conviction that if I stop, people die. I don’t know how to hand that to anyone else.
DI just wanted to get through the holidays with my family. Everything after that was self-defence.
NEXT QUESTION →
08
When the credits roll, what do people say about you?
Every franchise is really an argument about what makes someone worth watching.
AThat I was a myth people warned each other about in whispers, and that they were right to.
BThat I never left anyone behind, the door was always open, and there was always a place at the table.
CThat I did the impossible part myself, every single time, and never asked anyone to risk it for me.
DThat I was just a guy in the wrong place at the wrong time, who turned out to be very hard to kill.
REVEAL MY FRANCHISE →
Casting Has Been Completed
Your Franchise Is…
Four action series. One of them is built around exactly the way you
handle pressure, people, and a room that has just gone very quiet. Here is where you would survive
the trilogy, and probably headline it.
John Wick · Chapters 1–4 · 2014–2023
John Wick
You are precision with a grudge. You don’t posture, you don’t
escalate, and you don’t warn anybody twice. That is exactly why the people who know you are
so careful never to be the reason you start.
The Wick films run on discipline: an underworld with actual etiquette, a hero who
honours every rule of it, and a world that unravels the instant someone breaks one
against him.
You share that quality. You are extraordinarily reasonable right up to the line, and
then completely immovable past it.
Focus, commitment and sheer will. You’d be the one carrying grief through three sequels
and turning it into technique rather than noise.
People wouldn’t call you dangerous. They’d say your name quietly and let that do the
work.
The Fast and the Furious · Fast X · 2001–2023
Fast & Furious
You understand the thing the whole franchise is secretly about:
the cars are spectacular, but the crew is the point. You collect people, you keep them, and
you’d drive through a building for any one of them.
This series went from street racing to orbit without ever changing its actual subject,
because loyalty scales and plot doesn’t have to.
You have the same instinct. You build a family out of whoever turns up, and then you
defend it past the point of reason.
You’d thrive here because the franchise rewards exactly your strengths: warmth, nerve,
an absolute refusal to leave anyone behind, and a relaxed relationship with physics.
The mission can wait. The barbecue cannot.
Mission: Impossible · The Final Reckoning · 1996–2025
Mission: Impossible
You over-prepare and then take the dangerous part yourself
anyway. It looks like control, but it’s really responsibility. You have never worked out how
to ask somebody else to carry the risk.
This is the franchise of the plan that collapses on schedule: the team, the mask, the
rooftop, and the one person sprinting flat out because sprinting is all that’s left.
You share that refusal to accept an outcome. Told the odds, you treat them as an
administrative error.
You’d thrive here because these films reward competence and loyalty in equal measure.
The mission matters, but nobody on the team gets left on the wrong side of a door.
Some people delegate the cliff. You have never once been that person.
Die Hard · A Good Day to Die Hard · 1988–2013
Die Hard
You are not the most trained person in the building, the best
equipped, or the one anybody would have picked. You are simply the one still standing at the
end, which turns out to be the only qualification that matters.
Die Hard invented the modern action hero by making him mortal: outgunned, out-planned,
bleeding, and extremely funny about it.
You share that stubbornness. Adversity doesn’t make you noble, it makes you sarcastic,
and then it makes you unstoppable.
You’d thrive here because these films reward improvisation and nerve over preparation,
and you’ve never had the luxury of preparing anyway.
You didn’t want any of this. You just declined to be the person who let it happen.
↻ RETAKE THE QUIZ
What Is ‘The Weight’ About?
The official synopsis for The Weight, which was directed by Padraic McKinley, reads as follows: “In Oregon in 1933, Samuel Murphy is torn from his daughter and sent to a brutal work camp. Warden Clancy tempts him with early release if he smuggles gold through deadly wilderness, but betrayal festers within the crew, and Murphy questions how far he’ll go to see his child again.” Not only does The Weight hold a strong 92% from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, but this comes from 40 reviews, so it’s not a small sample size. The Weight has officially become a must-watch for Crowe fans or just fans of good movies.
Check out The Weight in theaters this weekend and stay tuned to Collider for more updates and coverage of Russell Crowe’s future projects.
Release Date
September 18, 2026
Runtime
115 minutes
Director
Padraic McKinley