Mayday movie 2026 now has a release date: Apple TV will stream it on Friday, September 4. The move puts Ryan Reynolds and Kenneth Branagh back in the same frame, this time inside a Cold War buddy comedy built around a crash, a chase, and a spy mission that goes sideways.
Ryan Reynolds and Kenneth Branagh
Ryan Reynolds plays Lieutenant Troy Kelly, a U.S. Navy pilot who goes rogue to save his wingman’s faulty plane. Kenneth Branagh plays Nikolai Ustinov, who prefers to be called Nick, an ex-KGB agent whose cabin holds a Top Gun poster on the wall. The pairing gives the film its commercial hook: a familiar action star against a performer with deep espionage baggage.
Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley wrote and directed the film. That matters because they are steering the movie as an 1980s-style buddy comedy rather than a straight spy thriller, so the release is being sold through tone as much as plot. Apple TV gets a date-specific launch with two recognizable names attached, which is the cleanest way a streaming title can cut through a crowded month.
1987 and the 1,200 miles
Mayday is set in 1987, one year after Top Gun was released. That timing is built into the movie’s framing: the story opens with a sky battle with Russian fighter pilots, then jumps into a covert mission to co-pilot the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird and capture images of missile silos 1,200 miles inside the Soviet border.
The operation goes sideways, and Troy wakes up in Nick’s cabin after the crash. From there, the film functions as a road movie across Russia, pushing the two men through planes, trains, and automobiles as they try to escape Soviet Russia while Alexander Volkov, a KGB official played by Marcin Dorociński, hunts them.
Cold War friction
The film leans on a contradiction that gives it shape: it is a Cold War story with anti-Russian elements, yet Nick is presented as an earnest admirer of “democracy, culture and food.” That split keeps the movie from playing as a one-note caricature; it also gives Branagh a different register from the antagonists he has played in Viktor Cherevin in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit and Andrei Sator in Tenet.
For viewers, the practical takeaway is simple. The movie arrives on Apple TV on Friday, September 4, and the release is centered on Reynolds, Branagh, and the 1987 setting rather than on a wide rollout. The question that remains is how broadly Apple TV will make Mayday available that day.
