Mark Wahlberg and Mel Gibson’s Flight Risk Leaving HBO Max in November 2026

Flight Risk brought Mark Wahlberg and director Mel Gibson together for an action thriller set largely aboard a plane. The film was Gibson’s first as a director since 2016’s Hacksaw Ridge.

When Flight Risk reached theaters in January 2025, it was widely considered a box office flop. It made $48 million worldwide against a $25 million budget.

The film found a wider audience after arriving on HBO Max in November 2025. It quickly became one of the service’s most-watched films and remained in its top 10 most-watched movies for months. Now, about a year into its run, Flight Risk is preparing to leave the platform.

When is Flight Risk leaving HBO Max?

Flight Risk is scheduled to leave HBO Max on Nov. 24, 2026, nearly a year after it was added.

Wahlberg plays Daryl Booth, an assassin hired to pose as the pilot of a Cessna carrying a U.S. Marshal, played by Michelle Dockery, and a fugitive, played by Topher Grace, across the Alaskan wilderness. Most of the film takes place inside the plane, where Booth shifts from cool and confident to wildly unhinged.

Wahlberg rarely plays villains. His last true villainous role was in the 1996 psychological thriller Fear. In the decades between the two films, he primarily played heroes and morally gray everyday citizens.

In a January 2025 interview with People magazine, Wahlberg said he apologized to his Flight Risk castmates for staying so absorbed in character: “I was locked into the part the whole time. So if we weren’t shooting, I was like either off in the corner by myself or I just would kind of go back to my little dressing room and just sit there. I apologized at the end because I wasn’t very engaging off camera or outside of shooting, but I was just in [that] headspace.”

Flight Risk has a 28% critics score and a 62% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. Reviews have been mixed. Vincent Mancini of GQ Magazine wrote, “Is it weird and stupid? Certainly. Is it also entertaining and fun? Absolutely. Making Mark Wahlberg bald in a movie with no narrative reason for his character to be bald is a stroke of absurd genius.”

Source: Polygon