Lionsgate really wants to make a big-budget John Wick videogame: 'There's a ton of energy around it'

Lionsgate really wants to make a big-budget John Wick videogame: ‘There’s a ton of energy around it’

Time Stamp: May 26, 2023 3:52 PM

In November 2022, Lionsgate said it was interested in turning the Keanu Reeves action film series John Wick into “a big AAA game.” That’s still very much the case: The company said in its most recent earnings call that there’s no specific action on that front at this point, but it’s eager to make it happen.

“We are continuing to have those conversations. There’s a ton of energy around it,” Lionsgate’s motion picture group chairman Joe Drake said (via Seeking Alpha). The continued growth of John Wick’s popularity “is very rare in any franchise, much less an action franchise,” Drake added, and that “creates a lot of energy and excitement in the company.

“It does the same with filmmakers, and we’re now moving across that franchise, not just in the AAA videogame space, but looking at what the regular cadence of spin-offs, television, [and] really growing that universe so that there is a steady cadence of a franchise that there’s clear appetite by the audience.”

While the John Wick videogame situation apparently hasn’t changed between last November and now, the John Wick situation overall actually has, and significantly for the better. The November statement, when Lionsgate said it was “interested” and “fielding proposals,” came before the release of John Wick 4, when executives may have been feeling concerns about potential franchise fatigue. But the fourth film was a hit—the highest grossing film in the John Wick series and one of the biggest of 2023 so far—and so it’s fair to say that any worries about people getting tired of watching Keanu Reeves commit creative mass murder are, at least for now, put to rest.

A big John Wick videogame may still be entirely aspirational at this point (although let us not forget that a smaller one has actually already happened: John Wick Hex, a tactical puzzler developed by Bithell Games that came out to very positive reviews in 2019), but plenty of other things are confirmed and coming soon, including the television series The Continental, which will debut later in 2023, and the spinoff film Ballerina, which is set to debut in 2024. A fifth John Wick film is also in development.

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