Netflix’s New Action Movie Blocks ‘Lucifer’ From No. 1 Spot

Kate, the new action movie starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead, spent its first weekend at the top of Netflix’s Top 10 in the U.S. chart. The fast-paced revenge thriller kept the last season of Lucifer from the top spot, with the series stuck at number two. It is not uncommon for the newest Netflix films to reach number one in their first weekend, as He’s All That achieved the same in late August.

In Kate, Winstead stars as the title character, an assassin whose mentor Varrick (Woody Harrelson) assigns her to kill the head of a Japanese crime syndicate. During the mission, she learns she has been poisoned and will only have 24 hours to live. She spends her final hours seeking revenge and trying to find out who set her up. The movie also stars Miku Martineau, Tabanobu Asano, Jun Kunimura, Michiel Huisman, and Miyavi.

The movie was directed by Cedric Nicolas-Troyan, who scored an Oscar nomination as a member of the Snow White and the Huntsman (2012) visual effects team. He also worked as a second unit director on Disney’s Maleficent (2014) before he directed The Huntsman: Winter’s War (2016). Kate was written by Umair Aleem and counts Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw director David Leitch as a producer. 87North Productions, the company Leitch runs with Chad Stahelski and Kelly McCormick, is one of the production companies on the movie.

Winstead recently starred as The Huntress in the DC Comics movie Birds of Prey. Her other film credits include Live Free or Die Hard, The Spectacular Now, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, Kill the Messenger, 10 Cloverfield Lane, and Gemini Man. She also starred in TV in BrainDead, Mercy Street, and Fargo Season 3.

In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Winstead noted that some of the fighting styles she picked up while making Birds of Prey came in handy while making Kate, but there were still major differences. “A lot of what 87Eleven and 87North do is really jiu-jitsu based, so you start out learning a lot of jiu-jitsu moves and then build from there,” she explained. “So a lot of it was still based in that kind of basic training, and then we added knife work, a lot more gunplay and just built off of what I had originally trained for with Birds.”

Winstead does not have another project yet, but if the opportunity came to make a movie featuring Huntress, she said she would be interested. “I was so happy that I was able to bring a bit of humor to that character,” she told THR. “When you’re playing an assassin, it can be so easy for things to get so self-serious, but it was great to be able to have a little bit of fun with her. So I would love to get to do more of that.”