A Forgotten Ryan Reynolds Movie Is Leaving Netflix, Watch Before It’s Gone

There's only a little time left to catch this Ryan Reynolds movie on Netflix.

By Faith McKay | Published

This article is more than 2 years old

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It may be easy for some to forget just how long of a career Ryan Reynolds has behind him. While many hadn’t noticed the actor much before he starred in 2015’s Deadpool, Reynolds has been with us for a long time. His first credits were in a television series in 1991. Mostly, he took on roles in comedies, which makes sense with how we know the actor today as the hilarious Wade Wilson. One such comedy from 2005 had Reynolds playing the role of a waiter at a restaurant. This lesser-known flick from the actor’s past is about to leave Netflix on April 30th.

Waiting… centers around the employees of a restaurant. The idea is similar to the television series Superstore or Party Down, where a group of unhappy employees get through their workday. In the case of Waiting…, the restaurant employees follow through on a lot of the worst tropes and nightmares you have about the activities that happen while your food is being cooked. This Ryan Reynolds movie loves gross-out humor. In the trailer alone, you can watch the employees embracing the five-second rule and doing terrible things to a rude guest’s food. You can watch the trailer below.

Ryan Reynolds is at the center of this ensemble cast, which includes a lot of faces you likely know today. While less known at the time, Anna Faris has been in her fair share of comedies now. She joins names like Justin Long, Luis Guzmán, John Francis Daley, and Rob Benedict, who Supernatural fans will now recognize as Chuck.  

The movie was written and directed by Rob McKittrick. While this is the only project that he both wrote and directed, he went on to write movies like Wedding Crashers 2.

For Ryan Reynolds, Waiting… falls at a point in his career where he seemed to be trying to do as much as absolutely possible. Considering how well-known the actor is today, we have to assume Reynolds had ambitions he wanted to realize. In 2005, he had four movies release. One was a TV movie. The others were The Amityville Horror, Waiting…, and Just Friends, which also featured Anna Faris. That year, Waiting… earned $18 million worldwide at the box office on a budget of $3 million.

The bigger release that year for Ryan Reynolds was Just Friends, which earned over twice as much with $50 million worldwide at the box office. While Just Friends hardly managed to be the big break Reynolds was after, it did gain him a lot more attention. That movie is often rerun on cable or found on streaming. Currently, it’s on Hulu. Just Friends falls in the same realm of humor, but is a romantic comedy where Reynolds spends a fair amount of the movie in a fat suit.

While the gross-out humor in Waiting… may not be for everyone, it still scores fairly well with audiences. On IMDb, the comedy has a score of 6.8. On Rotten Tomatoes, it has an audience score of 75%. Notably, the Tomatometer is 30%. Critics were not fans and have pulled the score down on this movie considerably. Common Sense Media said, “Waiting tries to be everything, but unfortunately, it doesn’t do anything particularly well.” Empire said the “waiting” done in this movie was on the part of the audience, who were waiting for something to be funny.

These days, we rarely have to wait for Ryan Reynolds to make us laugh. If you’re a fan, you can watch Deadpool any time. He can be counted on to make audiences laugh on social media. Of course, his biggest fans are getting a bit desperate for some of the promised movies that haven’t released due to the pandemic. Reynolds has a number of movies hidden away with delayed release dates. One such movie is Free Guy, which has been postponed several times. Making fun of this fact, Reynolds recently announced a new release date on Instagram for us.

Other upcoming movies with Ryan Reynolds include The Croods 2, The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard, and Red Notice. Reynolds stars in Red Notice with Gal Gadot and Dwayne Johnson. The thriller is expected to release on Netflix soon, though all the streaming service has confirmed for a release date is 2021.