Hong Kong Action Classic Redo, THE KILLER, Circles Lupita Nyong’o To Star

John Woo’s latest international thriller novel re-adaptation, Manhunt, opens in North America on Netflix this Friday. It’s a noteworthy mention considering the film is one of two that the celebrated director had been kicking around in the last several years – specifically at least one other title being his Hong Kong action classic, The Killer.

The film opened in 1989 and became a heroic bloodshed hit with actor Chow Yun-Fat in the role of a hitman who accidentally blinds a club singer during a shootout. The romance that ensues finds itself endangered when the exit job he takes to pay for her corneal transplant lands him in a deadly double-cross, forcing him to protect her with the help of the cop already hunting him down.

Chow, already a rising star following the John Woo/Tsui Hark-shepherded A Better Tomorrow, became synonymous with the bullet ballet genre for many a film thereafter. Efforts to remake the film in the West had been an enduring saga since 1992 up until Woo tossed it around three years ago and now with a script by Collide scribe Evan Creevy succeding a previous draft by Josh Campbell and Matt Stuecken (Cloverfield Lane), Deadline’s Mike Fleming Jr. is exclusively reporting actress Lupita Nyong’o for the very iconic role Chow played nearly thirty years ago.

Nyong’o, the Oscar-winning actress of 12 Years A Slave herself has been a prolific show these days in the Marvel fray with Captain America: Civil War and onward through this year’s hit Ryan Coogler release, Black Panther.

As Fleming Jr. reports, Universal Pictures is currently readying cameras to roll later this year in France and Germany. Woo is producing alongside Mark Gordon of eOne whose Josh Clay Phillips will also have a producing role as well as oversee production. Matt Jackson, Lori Tilkin and Luc Etienne are executive producing with regular Woo cohort, Terence Chang.