After almost two decades away from Hollywood, John Woo has two projects lined up that will see him return with aplomb. The first is a silent action movie (yes you read that right) starring The Suicide Squad’s Joel Kinnamen, and the second will be a remake of his own 1989 cult crime classic The Killer.
John Woo began his career with Hong Kong action movies starring Chow Yun-Fat, including The Killer and Hard Boiled (1992). He made the move to Hollywood with 1993’s Hard Target starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, and followed this up with Broken Arrow, Face/Off, and Mission: Impossible II. His last Hollywood movie was 2003’s Paycheck starring Ben Affleck.
He will be following up Silent Night, an entirely dialogue-free movie about a normal father who heads into the underworld to avenge his son’s death, with a ‘reimagining’ of The Killer for Peacock. The original was about a disillusioned assassin accepting one last job so he can right a wrong in his past. French actor Omar Sy came to international fame with 2011’s The Intouchables. He has had roles in X-Men: Days of Future Past, Jurassic World, and Ron Howard’s Inferno.
Omar Sy is now best-known as the star of Lupin, about a modern-day gentleman burglar in Paris inspired by the Arsene Lupin books by Maurice Leblanc. It’s similar to how the BBC Sherlock starring Benedict Cumberbatch updated the books by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Lupin is one of Netflix’s most-watched non-English language shows.
The Killer is being made by Universal, with a script by Matthew Stuecken and Josh Campbell (10 Cloverfield Lane), as well as Eran Creevy (Welcome to the Punch) and Brian Helgeland (A Knight’s Tale, Legend). It will be released on Peacock sometime in 2023. There’s a chance it may have to change its name in order to avoid confusion with David Fincher’s assassin movie called The Killer coming to Netflix in 2023.
While we wait for the new version of The Killer, check out our guide to the best spy movies.