Can The Killer's Game Become the Next John Wick?
How director J.J. Perry’s new assassin thriller could launch a cinematic universe.
Jordan “J.J.” Perry has been working on The Killer’s Game for over a decade.
“The movie [production] came to me about 10 or 11 years ago to be a stunt coordinator,” Perry tells Inverse. “They came to me again three years ago to be the second unit director.” Then, in 2023, the rights shifted to Lionsgate, and J.J., fresh off his directorial debut with Day Shift, was offered a seat in the director’s chair.
In another stroke of good luck, The Killer’s Game was able to film during the Hollywood strikes that ground most movie productions to a halt in 2023 by going outside the system and agreeing to union demands. All of a sudden, he was able to cast his dream ensemble, which includes everyone from movie stars like Dave Bautista and Ben Kingsley to action icons like Scott Adkins.
“Because we had a SAG waiver during that strike, everybody was available,” Perry says. “So they just dropped in on me. They dropped in on me hard. So that's how it worked out. We shot it in 42 days, which is very fast for a movie like that.”
The result, The Killer’s Game, is playing in theaters now. And it might just launch a new cinematic franchise, if J.J. Perry gets his way.
Not Just Another John Wick Knockoff
The Killer’s Game stars Bautista as a world-class assassin who falls in love and decides to retire for good, only to learn he has an incurable brain condition. So he does the only logical thing: he hires a bunch of assassins to murder him so his girlfriend (Sofia Boutella) can collect the insurance money. Then, once the hit has already been ordered, his doctor calls to tell him it’s a false alarm, putting Bautista up against an army of contract killers dispatched by a persistent crime boss played by Pom Klementieff.
If the above sort of sounds like John Wick with a rom-com twist, that’s not a huge surprise. Perry was a stuntman in the original John Wick and a stunt coordinator in the sequel. He’s a product of the same Keanu Reeves-powered stuntman-to-director pipeline that gave us David Leitch and Chad Stahelski. In other words, he’s in very good company.
“You work in the fun action movie genre long enough, you meet everyone that's on the production side,” Perry says. “There's not a lot of fish in that pool, but the water's deep.”
“It's great for him to show his softer side because he's a softie at heart,” Pom Klementieff says of her co-star Dave Bautista. “He’s so kind and he just speaks in a soft way. He's a gentleman too. And it was amazing to see the chemistry he has with Sofia Boutella.”
With the obvious parallels to John Wick, the team behind The Killer’s Game needed to prove their movie was different. One way they did this was by avoiding having any similar characters. For example, an earlier draft included an assassin who had a dog, which Perry cut because it was too close to The Tracker from John Wick 4.
Thankfully, he didn’t have any trouble coming up with new assassin characters.
“I have a lot of ideas for villains, I love bad guys versus bad guys,” Perry says, adding that he looked to classic ‘80s and ‘90s Hong Kong action flicks as another source of inspiration. “The bad guys were always badass. You almost want to root for them.”
Klementief in The Killer’s Game.
Klementieff, who spends most of the movie sitting behind a fancy desk while hiring assassins to hunt down Bautista, also praises the rogue’s gallery that Perry cooked up.
“They're all amazing and they have such a different style,” she says before calling out one specific actor. “I loved watching Lucy Cork fight again. She does all the pole dancing. I worked with her for years on Mission: Impossible. She was doing the stunts for other actresses and she's so skilled and sexy. I know that she had been pole dancing for years so it was amazing to get to see her showcase her talent.”
The Killer's Game Cinematic Universe
Warning: Spoilers ahead for the ending of The Killer’s Game.
“I would love to do a spinoff.”
While the book it’s based on doesn’t have a sequel, the movie leaves the door open for more. Bautista’s character survives and reunites with a pregnant Boutella, while Klementieff’s assassin boss winds up dead. From that ending, there are a few different directions The Killer’s Game could go, from a standard sequel to a cinematic universe that explores this web of killers for hire.
“I'd be stoked to do a sequel for Killers Game,” Perry says. “I've got a whole bunch of other characters that I could think of right now that I haven't used over the years that I would love to put in there.”
As for our main characters, the director is envisioning something along the lines of Shogun Assassin, a cult classic Japanese thriller from 1980 that follows a medieval samurai and his young son on a quest for revenge. In our interview, Perry pitches a similar concept for Bautista’s assassin and his new baby as he describes a key scene from Shogun Assassin.
“They have a baby carriage that has knives that pop out,” he says with excitement. “I don't know, we'll figure it out. But I think absolutely we should do a sequel.”
Poster art for Shogun Assassin.
As for Klementieff, while her character can’t logically appear in a sequel, the actor is still open to fleshing out The Killer’s Game universe.
“Maybe it's a prequel,” she says. “That would be fun. All the characters are so cool and colorful and I would love to do a spinoff. Or I would love to keep working with Dave too. We'll see what happens.”
What’s Next For J.J. Perry?
Perry (left) with the cast of The Killer’s Game.
Beyond The Killer’s Game, Perry’s got a few other projects in the works. For one thing, there’s that Day Shift sequel, which he’s teased several times after his vampire action-comedy made a splash on Netflix.
In a recent interview, Perry revealed that he has a pitch for Day Shift 2 and is hoping to partner with “the writer who did John Wick 4.” When I ask who he was talking about specifically (John Wick 4 has two credited screenwriters), he offers an interesting response.
“I'm friends with Derek Kolstad and I'm friends with Shay Hatten,” Perry says. (For context, Hatten co-wrote John Wick 4, while Kolstad is credited with creating the entire franchise.) “Derek came over yesterday and watched a rough cut of the movie I just finished called Afterburn. So I'm tight with all those brothers.”
Day Shift (2022)
Speaking of Afterburn, Perry’s next movie stars Bautista again, this time as a treasure hunter on a post-apocalyptic Earth as he sets out to retrieve the “Mona Lisa.” The cast also includes Samuel L. Jackson, Olga Kurylenko (Quantum of Solace), and Kristofer Hivju (Game of Thrones).
Perry describes this film as an “action-adventure, treasure-hunter” story with a sci-fi twist before offering up an enticing summary of the plot.
“Like six years after a solar flare takes out the grids and the whole world in governments, everything falls apart,” he says. “It's about a guy that was in the reappropriation business before. He’s still treasure hunting, but doing it as a means to get what he wants. It's a lot of fun.”
