Summary
- The Continental: From The World Of John Wick is set to serve as a perfect prologue to the John Wick series, expanding the franchise's world and diving into the backstory of the Continental's manager, Winston.
- The Continental will be a three-episode miniseries that takes place in the 1970s and will focus on a young version of Winston. It features an interesting cast, including Mel Gibson in a controversial role.
- The series will explore the rise of the Mafia's economic power in New York and England's Winter of Discontent, while still maintaining the franchise's focus on the assassins' underworld. The Continental's story will be told in three 90-minute episodes, the first of which arrives in September 2023.
The The Continental John Wick prequel spinoff — fully titled The Continental: From The World Of John Wick — is generating serious buzz, and it's shaping up to be the perfect prologue to the John Wick series. The John Wick franchise has built an expansive world with an underbelly of assassins living under the reign of the High Table, and John Wick: Chapter 4 expanded the universe even further, including hinting at a much deeper backstory about the Continental's manager, Winston (played by Ian McShane in the movies and Colin Woodell in the series). Though the ending of John Wick 4 could have been definitive, there are instead many plans for more projects in John Wick's world, with The Continental: From The World Of John Wick easily being one of the most anticipated.
The Continental is named after the Continental hotel chain that serves as a one-stop-shop for anything a member of the criminal underground needs in John Wick. First announced in 2017, The Continental TV series will be a spinoff that serves as a prequel to the main John Wick movie timeline, and will show more of the franchise's world beyond the central story of John Wick himself. Kirk Ward and Greg Coolidge act as showrunners for the series, with the franchise's director Chad Stahelski and screenwriter Derek Kolstad also executive producing. Lots of information about The Continental John Wick spinoff has already been revealed, including its cast, release date, and teaser trailer.
The Continental: Most Recent John Wick Prequel News
In the latest John Wick prequel series news, The Continental has a new trailer released by Peacock. Peacock released the trailer less than one month before The Continental would land on the streaming service. While it’s known that the series will expand on the lore of the John Wick franchise, the new trailer gives an idea of just how The Continental will do that by interspersing scenes from the series with explanations from the executive producers and production team.
The Continental trailer features the first meeting of two beloved characters in the franchise: Charon and Winston. Though both characters have an established history in the John Wick movies, that history is only hinted at in the modern day. The Continental, set decades earlier, will explore it. At the time of their meeting, Winston is at a low point and has to fix a mistake his brother made, but his meeting with Charon helps to push him toward becoming the Winston who eventually runs the Continental in the John Wick franchise.
The Continental Release Date
Even though John Wick: Chapter 4 was delayed by almost a whole year, the fourquel's follow-up will be available just six months after John Wick: Chapter 4's premiere. Having moved from Starz to Peacock, The Continental release date is set for Friday, September 22, 2023. The premier episode is titled "Night 1", and will be followed by "Night 2" on September 29, and "Night 3" on October 6. While the three-episode format isn't perhaps the extended binge-length season some were hoping for, putting The Continental out as a miniseries promises a contained narrative.
This is incredibly beneficial for the sleek and stylish world of John Wick, as creating a perpetually ongoing TV spinoff would risk overexposing the intriguing and mysterious underworld the hotel serves and oversaturating the franchise with too many characters and bulky difficult-to-untangle lore. The John Wick franchise has been so successful partly because it struck a perfect balance in these areas, by being a three-part small-screen spinoff The Continental can build on it without making it unwieldy and cumbersome for future movies like John Wick 5.
The Continental Cast: Are Any John Wick Characters In It?
The Continental John Wick spinoff sports an interesting cast, especially given that it's set in the '70s and will focus on a young version of Winston. The Continental cast will also feature other John Wick characters such as The Adjudicator, who was played by Asia Kate Dillon in John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum. However, just because the show features John Wick characters doesn't mean that it'll see any John Wick actors reprising their roles. The Continental is set in the '70s, meaning that Winston will likely be in his late 20s/early 40s, and the Adjudicator as seen in the threequel likely wasn't even born yet.
Instead, Winston will be played by Colin Woodell, and The Adjudicator will be played by Katie McGrath, who is likely a different character who held the Hight Table role before the one in John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum. Ayomide Adegun will play a younger version of Charon in The Continental cast too. However, the series also has a fascinating cast of new characters, even though not much is known about them. Mel Gibson plays a character named Cormac, and Hubert Point-Du Jour, Mishel Prada, Jessica Allain, Nhung Kate, and Ben Robson all have mysterious roles too.
Executive producers Albert Hughes and Basil Iwanyk spoke with IGN about the series, and about the decision to cast Mel Gibson in a role. Gibson has proven a controversial casting choice because of the backlash he has faced over his behavior on film sets in the past. While Gibson’s career hasn’t suffered for his actions, he has often been the subject of concern and criticism in the press.
While Iwanyk said there “wasn’t a consideration” when asked about Gibson’s controversial past, which includes an arrest for driving under the influence, Hughes offered a lengthier response. He explained:
"I think he fit the role, he fit what we needed based on his film past. And I'll leave others to debate the other stuff because it's not a black-and-white issue, and I don't want to be sound-byted and clickbait. That's a tricky game to get into. I have my own personal beliefs in life and whatnot about everything, but I'm here to entertain. And earlier in my career I wasn't so careful. But there's a weight that he brought, the stuff that he brought from his past roles and what he has done that we needed for this role. And I don't think anybody could have fit better, let's put it that way, just with his chops and his experience."
Gibson’s extensive history in film makes him an experienced actor with a wide range of performances, and it sounds as though his role is a meaty one for an experienced actor to tackle, though there are other actors with similar backgrounds in movies. The choice to cast Gibson in the John Wick prequel The Continental might turn off some potential audience , but the producers appear ready to accept that.
The Continental Story & John Wick Connections
While much is still shrouded in mystery, there are still plenty of details about The Continental story and the plot of the John Wick prequel show. Director Albert Hughes revealed that The Continental will still have John Wick's action, explaining, "So what kind of fighting styles do all these people have? This one’s into guns, this one, karate. This one has a kung fu style... Early on, there’s an opening sequence that is Kirk and I nodding to the fans, don’t worry, we got you. And we weave it in, throughout." In true John Wick fashion, The Continental will be partly set outside of the US too. Even though a big deal has been made out of the city of New York being embedded into the DNA of the series, some of The Continental will be set in England.
As The Continental John Wick spin-off takes place in the ‘70s, it'll follow Winston as he becomes the New York Continental manager. The Continental John Wick spinoff will also do something that the franchise has never done before, which is to interpolate real-life events. The series will heavily feature the Mafia's rise to economic power in the late 1970s in New York, hinting that Italians could have played a huge role in developing the High Table and the assassins' underworld. The show will also depict England's Winter of Discontent. The Winter of Discontent was one of the UK's coldest winters and is known for the huge number of trade union strikes.
However, The Continental won't be a historic drama - it is still a John Wick spinoff, so the franchise lore will still be the focus. With Winston is the main character of the show, The Continental will likely answer one big John Wick: Chapter 4 mystery. At the end of the fourquel, it was called The Continental a challenge because the John Wick series was never intended to be a string of movies with spinoffs and a shared universe. Hughes explained, "The issue we had with television was, how are we going to create a John Wick offshoot without cannibalizing ourselves or feeling like we’ve stripped mined the franchise." That's a problem that a lot of franchises have, as universes rapidly expand and studios develop so many spinoffs that it can oversaturate the IP.
However, the John Wick franchise has expertly built the world, using each movie as a building block and taking the world-building one step at a time without rushing, and The Continental looks like it'll do the same. By looking backward instead of forward, the series could feature some exciting, new reveals about the world, and Hughes has taken influence from a directing great to continue the cinematic flourishes of the franchise. The director added, "I love the film aesthetic of New York in the ‘70s; Sidney Lumet is one of my three favorite directors of all time."
How Many Episodes Of The Continental There Will Be
The Continental John Wick spin-off will tell its story in three episodes, and while that might seem a little on the low side, each of the three episodes will be 90 minutes long. The Continental is adopting BBC's Sherlock approach, which worked perfectly, as it gave each episode enough time to explore a mystery without feeling rushed. If the cinematography and storytelling in The Continental are as great as the John Wick movies, the episodes will feel more like a trilogy of movies than a TV series. Hughes directed the first and third episodes, while Charlotte Brändström (The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power) directed the second episode.
The Continental Trailer
The Continental's teaser trailer didn't reveal much in 90 seconds, but it sets the tone and gives a glimpse of a much more agile and action-ready Winston. It was the teaser's release that also revealed the full title of the series, The Continental: From the World of John Wick. The John Wick prequel updates have revealed screenshots of the series, which actually give more away about the show than the trailer with closer looks at Woodell, Gibson, and Adegun. The images show more ing characters too, and between the 70s New York setting, the costumes, and the violent concept, they give off an aesthetic similar to The Warriors, which John Wick: Chapter 4 even referenced.
After releasing that teaser, however, Peacock released a full-length The Continental trailer as well. With Earth, Wind, and Fire’s “Shining Star” playing over the action, the trailer depicts a Continental not too unlike the one that the audience of the John Wick franchise already knows. The hotel has a lot of eccentric guests with a lot of dangerous occupations, but the focus in the trailer is on Winston Scott. He finds himself in the precarious position of having to set things right on behalf of his brother, who stole something from the hotel.
The trailer makes it clear that this three-part John Wick prequel series is set prior to Winston Scott becoming the person in charge of The Continental. In fact, he’s at odds with those who are in the Continental’s employ because of his brother. Mel Gibson’s Cormac tasks Winston with retrieving the item his brother took from some very powerful people, but Winston decides to take matters into his own hands, trying to gather a crew to get ahead of Cormac and get The Continental out from under the mafia leader’s control.
With impressive action sequences involving both hand-to-hand combat and firearms, The Continental trailer fits right into the John Wick franchise. While The Continental trailer doesn’t go into detail about every character that is present in the series, it does showcase most of them in action in breathtaking fight scenes and action sequences, giving the audience an interesting look at the 1970s era of John Wick’s world.
Source: Collider
