John Wick director Chad Stahelski lays bare the state of several of his potential next projects – including Ghost Of Tsushima.
With the release of John Wick: Chapter 4 earlier this year, we know that Chad Stahelski is done with that series for a while at least. What we don’t yet know is which of the several projects he has discussed taking on will be next up for the filmmaker. Guess what? Chad Stahelski doesn’t appear to know either.
The director was recently on the Happy Sad Confused podcast where to some degree, he cleared up his cluttered slate by offering a few thoughts on four potential projects that are in the pipeline.
Firstly, the Rainbow Six movie, which is supposed to feature Michael B. Jordan and be a sequel to 2021’s Without Remorse. That project doesn’t appear to be next in line with Stahelski saying “we’re in a bit of a conundrum right now with developing that obviously with strikes.” It sounds like that one is very much still at the planning/writing stage then, so we can bump that one down the list.
Next up, Stahelski talked about his planned adaptation of the popular PlayStation game, Ghost Of Tsushima. Sony has demonstrated with the recent release of Gran Turismo that it can fast-track its PlayStation Productions films effectively and in the past, Stahelski has seemed to hint that this might be his next project. However, the filmmaker didn’t confirm that, instead stating:
“This is one of the most beautiful video games ever made, so it’s a challenge to not do less than the guys over at Sucker Punch [game developers] have done.”
“It’s using all Japanese and all Asian cast for the Mongols and get the rest of the world behind that,” he adds, “that’s a cool thing to do. It doesn’t have to be all subtitled or all English, like there’s a way to express that because I think if anyone knows the game it’s a fantastic story, it’s an incredible myth, it ties into some very specific Japanese mythology, but at the same time its got a story that transcends any kind of nationality.”
However, Stahelski also talked up the state of his long-mooted Highlander remake, talking about the extensive work that had gone into building the series’ dense mythology into a film which could kick off a franchise starter. Speaking about the project, which is set to feature Henry Cavill in the lead role, Stahelski said: “I think we have some very good elements now. The trick is when you have the tagline ‘there can only be one’, you can’t just kill everybody the first time. I’ll say it for you first, our story engages a lot of the same characters and stuff like that, but we’ve also brought in elements of all the TV shows, and we’re trying to do a bit of a prequel, a setup to The Gathering, so we have room to grow the property.”
The filmmaker also said that another John Wick movie is always on the cards too, but that neither he or star Keanu Reeves have an idea at this point on where to take the series next.
So there you go. We’re hoping that Stahelski figures it out soon because we’d happily take any of those projects next but if we can’t have them all at once, then we’d at least like to know which one is next so we can scale our anticipation accordingly. We’ll bring you more updates on Mr Stahelski’s busy schedule as we hear them.
—
Thank you for visiting! If you’d like to support our attempts to make a non-clickbaity movie website:
Follow Film Stories on Twitter here, and on Facebook here.
Buy our Film Stories and Film Stories Junior print magazines here.
Become a Patron here.
