Omar Sy To Tackle John Woo’s THE KILLER In New Reimagining For Peacock
The Takedown and Jurrasic World: Dominion actor Omar Sy will lead The Killer for John Woo’s newest directorial effort for Peacock, as reported by the trades on Thursday.
The Takedown and Jurrasic World: Dominion actor Omar Sy will lead The Killer for John Woo’s newest directorial effort for Peacock, as reported by the trades on Thursday.
Legendary action auteur John Woo (Hard Boiled, Face/Off, Manhunt) is bring back the action with new revenge thriller, Silent Night. Handling worldwide sales on the new film at the Cannes market this week is Capstone Global who are now providing a first look still featuring lead actor Joel Kinnaman (The Suicide Squad) which you can view above.
John Woo fans have more to celebrate following the auteur’s 75th birthday, specificially for folks who are subscribed to NBCUniversal streamer Peacock with the announcement of a remake of 1989 action hit, The Killer.
How’s this for ambitious? Legendary filmmaker John Woo is readying a Hollywood comeback with Silent Night, a literally dialogue-free action thriller starring Joel Kinnaman (The Suicide Squad). Deadline‘s AFM-attentive Mike Fleming Jr. broke the news and revealed the following:
With the scaled-back 25th Busan International Film Festival set to launch next month, we now have a look at the long-awaited omnibus, Septet: The Story Of Hong Kong, formerly known as Eight And A Half by most outlets.
It’s almost surprising that acclaimed action auteur John Woo hasn’t found himself in the throes of a Western film production yet. It’s not for lack of trying either considering his willful transition in the early 1990s to work on Universal Pictures’ Hard Boiled and enduring through a great deal of bureaucracy to release his cut of the film; It’s imaginable that this could have been a stepping stone toward that goal at the time for Woo in his post-Hong Kong career, although relocating to China after several productions in the U.S. made it pretty clear that at least tentatively, it wasn’t meant to be.
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.
Film auteur John Woo’s latest return to the helm with action thriller, Manhunt, hasn’t been the most celebrated, critically. At best, the reviews are a mix and it’ll also be a neat viewing for loyal fans and completists still keen on his work or interested in seeing a multilingual thriller that promises something in some capacity. Zhang Hanyu and Fukuyama Masaharu star.
Release dates are pending while Media Asia is now installing the first official international trailer into circulation. Check it out below!
The Long Road
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