Mayday will stream on Apple TV on Friday, September 4, giving viewers a firm date for the Cold War buddy comedy led by Ryan Reynolds and Kenneth Branagh. Set in 1987, the film follows a U.S. Navy pilot and an ex-KGB agent as they fight their way across Russia.
That release date is the reason the movie is suddenly back in the conversation. Anyone searching for Mayday Movie 2026 is really looking for the when, the who and the shape of the story, and Apple TV has now answered the first of those plainly. Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley wrote and directed the film, which frames its action as a fast-moving escape rather than a straight spy thriller.
Reynolds plays Lieutenant Troy Kelly, who is enlisted for a covert mission to co-pilot a Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird and photograph missile silos 1,200 miles inside the Soviet border. The mission goes sideways at the start of the film, and a sky battle with Russian fighter pilots leaves the plane as fiery debris in a snow-laden forest. Kelly wakes up in the cabin of Nikolai Ustinov, the ex-KGB agent played by Branagh, and the film turns from espionage to survival.
Branagh’s character is not written as a simple enemy. A Top Gun poster is pinned to the wall in Ustinov’s cabin, and the role is described as belonging to a man with an earnest appreciation of American democracy, culture and food. That detail matters because Reynolds’ Troy Kelly says Russia is fundamentally broken and not a society at all, while Ustinov is drawn as someone who admires the very country Kelly represents. The contradiction gives the film its friction: one man talks like a true believer in American power, the other behaves like a convert to it.
From there, Mayday functions as a road movie across Russia, with Troy Kelly and Nikolai Ustinov moving by planes, trains and automobiles as they try to escape Soviet Russia. The film also includes Alexander Volkov, a KGB official played by Marcin Dorociński, and the action broadens into a train full of Russian soldiers and a car chase involving a nuclear tra... Wait, continue correctly?
