First Look: Chris Evans and Emily Blunt in David Yates’ ‘Pain Hustlers’

The first look at Chris Evans and Emily Blunt in David Yates‘ ‘Pain Hustlers‘ has been revealed by Entertainment Weekly. The film follows a high school dropout who lands a job with a failing start-up, where she finds herself at the center of a criminal conspiracy. See the images below.

What is the Plot of Pain Hustlers?

Based on the real-life story of capitalism run amok — chronicled by journalist Evan Hughes in his 2022 narrative non-fiction book, The Hard Sell — Pain Hustlers lures you into the glamour and excitement of success, however, it may be achieved. Liza Drake (Blunt) is a single mom working as a dancer at a bar when she meets Pete Brenner (Evans), a greasy drug rep for a pharmaceutical startup on the verge of bankruptcy. With a hunch about her talent, he recruits her to peddle a new kind of opioid designed to give pain relief to cancer patients.

Completely out of her depth, Liza struggles to make a dent before convincing one doctor to favor her company’s drug, cracking the code, and writing a new (unscrupulous) playbook for getting physicians to prescribe medication. She quickly makes her mark and forms a dazzling team that starts applying the scheme across the country. It rockets the company and Liza’s life to heights she could have never imagined. Liza eventually wakes up to the harm she’s sowing, which only complicates her relationship with Brenner, as he begins to see her as more than just a sales quota. We root for Liza to provide a stable home for her daughter and help her mother (Catherine O’Hara), all the while doing our best to avoid the truth that she’s helping kickstart the opioid epidemic. It’s a stunning feat from Blunt, who gives a compassionate performance as a woman flying too close to a sun that’s destroying people’s lives.

Directed by David Yates, the film is adapted from Evan Hughes’ 2022 book of the same name, with a screenplay by Wells Tower. The cast also includes Andy García, Catherine O’Hara, Jay Duplass, Brian d’Arcy James, and Chloe Coleman. (See the set images).

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Yates said, “I spent such a long time in green-screen studios creating these massive environments and these crazy creatures. So, it was really going back to my roots. It’s going way back.” Yates added, “There wasn’t a visual effect in sight [in those television series]. So the beauty of Pain Hustlers for me was to come back to those roots—to come back to where the most exciting thing in a scene is an authentic moment between two actors rather than a big special effect. It was a welcome return to doing things that I’d done a lot of previous to entering the Harry Potter world.”

‘Pain Hustlers’ is set to premiere at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival on September 11, 2023. It will then hit select U.S. theaters on October 20, 2023, before becoming available for streaming on Netflix on October 27, 2023.