One of the most interesting worlds created for a movie we’ve seen in the past few years has been the hidden world of assassins seen in the Keanu Reeves starring-action pick John Wick and its sequel John Wick Chapter 2. And now Lionsgate is looking to expand that world out into its own cinematic universe.
Lionsgate has picked up the spec script Ballerina with an eye towards tweaking it into a spin-off of the action franchise.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, the story focuses “on a young woman raised as an assassin who must hunt down the other assassins that murdered her family.”
This marks the first sale of newcomer Shay Hatten, whose script Maximum King!, a comedic fictionalization of writer Stephen King’s struggles to direct his horror film Maximum Overdrive, landed on last year’s Black List. He is currently working as a writer’s assistant at Robert Downey Jr.’s production shingle, Team Downey.
This is not the first move that Lionsgate has made to build out the universe created for the John Wick films. Earlier this summer there was news that the studio was developing a TV series titled The Continental, named after the hotels that cater to the assassins in the John Wick world.
