Ryan Reynolds' Best Reviews in a Decade Depend Entirely on Which Website You Open

Mayday arrived on Apple TV this week: 111 minutes, PG-13, shot in Montreal more than two years ago under the working title Blackbird. Ryan Reynolds plays Lieutenant Troy "Assassin" Kelly, a US Navy pilot stranded behind enemy lines in Russian territory at the height of the Cold War. Kenneth Branagh plays the man he ends up shackled to. Apple's tagline: "A friendship with major red flags."

It is written and directed by Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley — Game Night, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves — a detail worth stating plainly, because a fair amount of the coverage has attached Shawn Levy's name to it. Levy did not direct this. He is not on it in any capacity. His next film is Star Wars: Starfighter, out 28 May 2027, starring a different Ryan.

The "career-best" headline is a rounding convention

Mayday sits at 88% on Rotten Tomatoes, from 33 reviews. Against Reynolds' filmography that is genuinely the highest number since Mississippi Grind hit 91% in September 2015 — just under eleven years. So the "best in a decade" framing survives, narrowly.

Then open Metacritic, where the same critics writing in the same week produce a 60 out of 100, from 20 reviews: ten positive, seven mixed, three negative. Metacritic files that under "Mixed or Average."

Both aggregators are working from the same notices. Rotten Tomatoes counts thumbs; Metacritic counts degrees. The bulk of Mayday's reviews score between 63 and 75 — comfortably fresh, unambiguously middling. Which produces this:

• Mayday on Metacritic: 60.
• Deadpool (2016) on Metacritic: 65.
• Mississippi Grind (2015) on Metacritic: 77.

Reynolds' supposed best-reviewed film in eleven years scores lower than Deadpool and seventeen points below the film the eleven-year clock is measured against. The record is not a record. It is a scoring system. If you want a reminder of how far apart critical verdicts on the same film can sit, Quentin Tarantino and Ridley Scott cannot agree on a Ridley Scott film.

And 33 reviews is a small, early sample. For scale: Deadpool & Wolverine carries 421. An 88% built on 8% of that volume is one bad Friday from being an 82%.

His best notices in a decade are attached to a film with no measurable box office

Reynolds has spent ten years being a commercial fact. Deadpool & Wolverine is the highest-grossing R-rated film ever made, and scored 77%. Mayday scores eleven points higher and goes straight to Apple TV, where the box office line reads "n/a," Apple publishes no viewership, and no budget has ever been disclosed by anyone — not Apple, not Skydance, not the trackers.

Here is the comparison set, since the claim deserves testing:

• Mayday (2026) — 88%, 33 reviews
• Deadpool (2016) — 85%, 345 reviews
• Deadpool 2 (2018) — 83%
• Free Guy (2021) — 80%
• Deadpool & Wolverine (2024) — 77%
• The Adam Project (2022) — 68%
• IF (2024) — 50%
• Red Notice (2021) — 36%
• Green Lantern (2011) — 25%

It sat on a shelf for 28 months and the world moved underneath the joke

Principal photography ran from 4 March to 8 May 2024. Post-production finished in February 2026. Apple did not announce a release date until 3 February 2026. That is roughly twenty-eight months between wrap and release, with no public explanation for the delay.

In that time the premise aged. The Associated Press's Lindsey Bahr, scoring it 63: "it is a strange time to be releasing a movie with a sense of humor about Russia." A Cold War buddy comedy greenlit in June 2023 has been delivered into a September 2026 its writers could not have been writing for.

Reynolds produced it. The reviews keep handing the trophy to Branagh.

Reynolds is above the title and a credited producer through his own Maximum Effort. Yet the critics who liked it most reach past him. RogerEbert.com's Brian Tallerico singles out "a truly entertaining performance from Kenneth Branagh." Richard Crouse writes that Branagh "steals every scene in an attention-grabbing performance."

The rest of the notices are warm and slightly hedged. Collider's Aidan Kelley calls it "one of the best action movies of 2026." The Globe and Mail: "A rip-roaringly paced, imaginatively shot buddy comedy." The Los Angeles Times: "equal parts laugh-out-loud comedy and death-defying adventure." The Hollywood Reporter's Frank Scheck, more temperately: "The popcorn film proves an entertaining diversion, thanks to the mismatched-buddy comic chemistry."

For the directors, this is a step down

Goldstein and Daley made Vacation (27%) and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (91%, from 317 reviews) — a sixty-four-point swing between two films by the same two people. Mayday's 88% is being written up as a Reynolds career event. For the men who actually made it, it is a slightly worse result than last time, on a quarter of the reviews.

What nobody knows yet

• The budget. Undisclosed by everyone.
• The audience score. It has only just been released.
• Whether 88% holds. Expect movement over the next fortnight.
• How many people watch it. Apple does not publish streaming figures, so there will likely never be a public number.
• Why it sat for twenty-eight months. No reporting has explained it.

Cast, for the record: Reynolds, Branagh, Maria Bakalova, Marcin Dorocinski, David Morse, Lovell Adams-Gray, Clark Johnson and Alex Mallari Jr. Produced by Apple Studios, Skydance and Maximum Effort.