Just a few weeks after one of the stars of the John Wick franchise, Ian McShane, ripped Lionsgate’s TV spin-off The Continental live on TV, the studio seems like it’s going full steam ahead on a John Wick TV show. According to Deadline, Lionsgate vice chairman Michael Burns said as much during a Q&A at the Morgan Stanley media conference. “I think we’ll take one of our great action franchises starring Keanu Reeves, I think it’ll be a television series,” said Burns, who also revealed that the studio is planning a Twilight animated series too.
Readers will remember another John Wick tv series, The Continental, dropping just a few months ago. According to Burns, the new Wick show will not be related to that series of three 90-minute telefilms, which was about the early adventures of the character played by Ian McShane in the proper John Wick movies, Winston. The series wasn’t terribly well received by fans (although apparently it was popular on Peacock), nor by McShane himself, who recently complained about it during an interview with BBC, saying, “they never asked anybody about it. They just went and did it. Just went and did it. Somebody asked Keanu and me about it. We both went, ‘I don’t know. Nobody ever asked us about it.’”
No news yet on whether or not anyone involved with the John Wick films, such as director Chad Stahelski will be involved in a hands-on capacity. The studio seems hellbent on expanding the John Wick series into a major franchise. They recently bumped the Ana de Armas spin-off, Ballerina, to 2025 after Stahelski was called in for additional shooting. As McShane himself explained, “we did it about a year ago. And they’ve looked at it and Chad’s come in. And they wanna make it better cause they have to protect [the franchise].”
One thing worth noting is how rarely TV adaptations of big-screen action properties tend to work. Just recently, TV spin-offs for Taken and The Transporter laid an egg. Without a strong premise, fans tend to regard small-screen clones as little more than rip-offs.
Is Lionsgate making a mistake trying to build out the John Wick universe, or should they just let Stahelski do his thing and keep it limited to movies? Let us know in the comments.