“This series is truly unlike anything else on TV,” Starz CEO Chris Albrecht said. “The Continental promises to include the thunderous fight sequences and intensely staged shootouts between professional assassins and their targets that fans have come to expect in the John Wick movie franchise as well as introducing some new, darkly compelling characters who inhabit this underground world.”
If you think Lionsgate is done blowing your collective minds into the stratosphere and beyond with all things John Wick, you couldn’t be more wrong. Point in fact, with a comic book and a television series spin-off brewing, it turns out that the studio is ready to make the world of the titular assasin a whole lot bigger.
The word now is Ballerina – such is the title of the script acquired by Lionsgate in a bidding war against other studios last week. The project is described as a tonal nod to Luc Besson’s 1990s action movie fervor with La Femme Nikita, but with a more pulpy, hyper-stylized treatment akin to the work of Quentin Tarantino or Matthew Vaughn.
Story details haven’t been made public, save for the plot generally centered on a young woman raised as an assassin and subsequently sets out to murder her family’s equally trained killers. The sale of the script is a milestone success for fledgling screenwriter, 23-year old Shay Hatten, a Loyola Marymount’s School of Film and Television 2016 graduate who snagged an internship at Team Downey where he worked his way up the ladder while setting aside time to birth his Stephen King-inspired black comedy Black List script, Maximum King!, as well as Ballerina.
Thunder Road’s Basil Iwaynk is producing the film for which a director is yet to be named. Keanu’s expected return to the title role of the stoic ex-hitman and target of The Continental’s deadliest killers is now in the works with the involvement of John Wick and John Wick: Chapter Two co-helmer/helmer, Chad Stahelski, and screenwriter Derek Kolstad. (THR)