The JOHN WICK Spinoff Series THE CONTINENTAL Will Focus on a Young Winston and Other Details Revealed
Lionsgate is getting ready to start production on the John Wick spinoff series The Continental. The series will center around the chain of hotels that cater to the assassins in the world of John Wick. The series will also expand on the history of the league of assassins. It was already explained:
The Continental will be way earlier in the history of the series. So it’ll be a fresh look at the continental as the hotel and how that came into the being of John Wick. It’s way back in terms of the movies.
We now have some new details to share with you regarding the story, and it is going to focus on a young version of Ian McShane's character Winston. When talking about the series, Lionsgate TV head Kevin Beggs said the spinoff would also be set in the 1970s:
"We took a lot of pitches, and then the creative team from this obscure little show called Wayne that was on YouTube came to us with their take. We were really blown away because it solved a bunch of problems and was super exciting, about a crumbling New York in the 1970s with a garbage strike that has piled up bags of garbage to the third floor of most brownstones, the mafia muscling in on that business which is why in The Sopranos he’s in the sanitation business, and other things that are really real as an interesting backdrop to explore the origins of The Continental which is famously within the movie franchise the assassin’s hotel in which you cannot kill anyone on the hotel grounds, but of course if you step one foot off you’re fair game, and that’s employed to great effect in many of the plots in the movies. Running all of that is Winston, who is played by Ian McShane."
It’s said that the series will explore Winston's rise to power and that it will be made in a different format than what fans of a TV show would come to expect:
"What we’re exploring in The Continental is the young Winston and how it came to be that he and his team of confederates found their way into this hotel which we have met for the first time in the movie franchise 40 years later. That’s the arena. I won’t give away more than that, but Starz really leaned into this take also, and they have been great collaborators. And how we’ve approached this first season is as three essentially 90-minute events which you could construe as a limited series or a limited event series."
I love this concept and I’m super stoked to see this story get told! The creators of John Wick and Keanu Reeves are all involved in this project. What do you all think of the concept? Are you onboard?