By Emmanuel King
Netflix used Tuesday morning to announce the reunion its action audience did not know it was getting. Jason Statham will star in Dogfight, a revenge thriller written, directed and produced by Guy Ritchie, and the seventh film the two men have made together. The streamer describes the project as a stylish revenge actioner set in the London criminal underworld, which is a deliberate return to the territory where the partnership started. Production is set to begin in early 2027 in the United Kingdom. Plot details are being kept under wraps, no other casting has been announced, and Netflix has set no release date.
The deal
Statham does not arrive on this one as hired talent alone. He stars and produces, through his own company Punch Palace, alongside Ritchie's Toff Guy Films and Black Bear. The producing line runs four deep: Ritchie, Statham, Ivan Atkinson, Ritchie's partner at Toff Guy, and John Friedberg of Black Bear. All three banners also stand behind the pair's previous film, so Dogfight is less a new arrangement than the current shape of a working system: a financier and distributor in Black Bear, the director's company, and the star's company, sharing the top of the call sheet and the credits at the same time. For now, Statham is the only actor attached, with the rest of the cast to be built around him ahead of the 2027 start.
The third banner is worth a note of its own. Black Bear has become the pair's repeat financier, having produced Ritchie's The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare and Statham's Shelter, along with Ritchie's In the Grey and Wife & Dog. Three films into the arrangement, the same three companies keep reassembling, which is what a stable independent system looks like in practice: the money, the director and the star already know how they work together before a script is finished. One question Netflix has not answered is whether Dogfight gets any theatrical window at all, a detail that matters for a star whose career was built on the big screen.
Seven films, twenty eight years
The partnership began with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels in 1998, a first feature on both sides of the camera: Ritchie's debut as a director and Statham's first screen role, playing Bacon, a streetwise hustler in a cast of unknowns. Snatch followed in 2000 and Revolver in 2005. Then came a long gap, while Statham built himself into one of the most reliable action stars in the world and Ritchie moved through studio franchises of his own. Wrath of Man in 2021 and Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre in 2023 restarted the run, and their sixth film, Viva La Madness, has already been shot and sits in post production, still waiting on a release date. Dogfight makes seven, and it carries two firsts. It is Statham's first original film for Netflix after a career built almost entirely on theatrical action, and it is Ritchie's second project for the streamer after The Gentlemen series, and his first feature made for Netflix.
The actor as owner
Read the credits closely and the real story is not the reunion. It is the ownership. The actor Ritchie cast as a hustler in 1998, in the first role of his life, now sits beside the director's own company in the production credits, a producer on the film he is headlining. That did not happen by accident or by courtesy. Punch Palace is a working shingle, and the proof is the film ahead of this one in the queue. Viva La Madness exists because Statham bought the rights to J.J. Connolly's novel, the sequel to Layer Cake, back in 2013, and developed the film himself, with Ritchie eventually co-writing the script alongside Connolly. Ritchie has said the two of them spent about a decade trying to get it made before cameras finally rolled; filming wrapped in April, and the movie is now in the edit.
That is the leverage arc in full. An actor's value is usually rented by the production, paid out in salary and finished when the shoot wraps. Statham spent twenty eight years converting repeat business into something more durable: a company, a library of material he controls, and a standing seat on the producing side of the director he works with most. When Netflix buys a Statham and Ritchie film now, it is not simply hiring the two men who made Lock, Stock. It is buying into a partnership both of them own.
What happens next is straightforward. Casting announcements should land across 2026 as the early 2027 start approaches, and Viva La Madness will reach audiences first, a working test of the partnership's current form before Dogfight begins. Seven films in, the most durable property in either man's career is not a character or a title. It is the working relationship itself, and this time both names are on the ownership line.