Nerdy actor friends Chris Evans and Scarlett Johansson to reunite for Apple adventure movie

The Marvel Cinematic Universe is effectively the Hollywood equivalent of serving as an elected official. You don’t get to have a private life or do whatever you want, you just serve at the pleasure of the public as an ambassador of the biggest movie franchise in the world. Until you hang up your superhero suit, you are no longer An Actor or even A Person, you’re a Hulk or a Spider-Man or a Happy Hogan. If you make a movie in the middle of your MCU term, it’s not The Judge, starring Robert Downey Jr., it’s The Judge, starring a shaved Tony Stark for some reason. Once you leave the MCU, though, you’re free to get back to living your own life and doing whatever you want.

For two of the MCU’s most recently retired stars, that means nerding out like a couple of nerds and doing some traditional non-franchise acting (and also, for one of them, some suing). We’re talking a movie that’s not based on anything and isn’t a sequel to anything. It’s not even a prequel to anything. It’s just… a movie. The two acting nerds we’re talking about are Chris Evans and Scarlett Johansson, who are now both freed from the pressures of the MCU—possibly temporarily, for one of them—and are finally able to get back to, you know, acting. They’re actors.

If it seems like we’re using a lot of words to say “Scarlett Johansson and Chris Evans are doing a new movie together,” we should explain that we don’t know a whole lot about the movie they’re making. The Hollywood Reporter says it’s called Ghosted and that it’s an “adventure movie” in the vein of Romancing The Stone for Apple, with Deadpool’s Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick writing and Rocketman’s Dexter Fletcher directing, but that’s all we know. Apparently Romancing The Stone-style adventure movies are the hot new thing. Move over, superhero movies. You belong in the trash with cowboy movies and adult dramas.