This John Wick-style action film grossed $100 million at the box office, but the sequel is not about to see the light of day with Netflix!

News culture This John Wick-style action film grossed $100 million at the box office, but the sequel is not about to see the light of day with Netflix!

Fallen into oblivion

After the success of the first part of John Wick, director David Leitch decided to stand on his own two feet to make Atomic Blonde, an action film very similar to the saga led by Keanu Reeves, this time led by Charlize Theron. A loose adaptation of the graphic novel The Coldest City, Atomic Blonde does not reinvent the wheel, but nevertheless manages to distance itself from its counterpart with its story anchored in Germany at the end of the Cold War. High-energy action, a gripping spy intrigue, a few humorous sequences… all that was needed for the feature film to shine at the box office. For an estimated budget of around $30 million, the film grossed over $100 million. A great success, which could legitimately have led to the start of work on a sequel. This new part even became very concrete, before falling into oblivion.

A compromised sequel?

A few years after the success of Atomic Blonde, Netflix decided to acquire the rights to the film to begin production of a sequel. In 2020, Charlize Theron even claimed that the project had been validated by the platform and that writing had begun.

We took Atomic Blonde 2 under our arms and presented it to Scott Stuber, head of Netflix original productions for feature films. We talked a lot with him, and we started writing the script very recently. In the first film, the character was presented in a certain way, which means that we still know relatively little about her. So there is real potential to go further.

But almost five years later, still nothing. Recently, it was David Leitch who revealed the problem to The Direct. According to the filmmaker, it is the question of rights management that prevents Netflix from fully launching production.

Everyone is still trying to resolve the rights issues, and the project went from Universal to Netflix for a while, and now it's stuck between too many forces working against each other to try to make it happen , because it's such a great intellectual property and it would be awesome to go back and revisit this world and this character. So, I hope we can do it…

For now, therefore, we will still have to be patient and wait until a studio manages to fully get their hands on the rights to Atomic Blonde to fully launch this sequel.