Mel Gibson Joins 'John Wick' TV Series

By Stephen Andrew

The in-development John Wick TV series just took a huge step forward, as it's been announced that iconic Hollywood star Mel Gibson has joined the show's cast. According to Deadline, Gibson will star as a character named Cormac in The Continental, which is set to air on Starz as a three-night special-event TV series. At this time, no other cast members have been announced, but we do know that Keanu Reeves, who stars as Wick in the film series, will not be appearing, as the story is a prequel to the movies.

The Continental is set in the mid-1970s and will focus on a young Winston Scott, who is played by legendary actor Ian McShane in the John Wick films. It will tell the origins of Scott and the Continental, a hotel exclusively for the underground cabal of for-hire-assassins and crime syndicates. According to a description of the series from Deadline, the show will follow Scott as he plots to take control of the hotel, all while narrowly avoiding the bullets of some vicious paid gunmen. McShane will likely not appear in the series, but he could possibly turn up in a narration capacity.

The first John Wick came out in 2012 and made over $88 million on a budget of less than $30 million. The second film in the franchise — John Wick: Chapter 2 — opened in 2017 and made over $170 million on a $40 million budget. John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum premiered in 2019 and raked in a worldwide revenue total of more than $325 million on a budget of less than $75 million. Collectively, the three John Wick films alone have made the franchise over a half-billion dollars. This sum is on a combined budget of somewhere under $145 million. To say that the franchise has been lucrative is quite an understatement.

John Wick: Chapter 4, the next film in the series, is currently in production. The film was originally set to shoot back-to-back with John Wick 5, but Lionsgate, the production studio, opted to postpone those plans due to production plans likely attributed to the Covid-19 pandemic. John Wick: Chapter 4 is being filmed on its own, with a 2022 premiere date, and Chapter 5 will be filmed at a later date. There is also a proposed spinoff, tentatively titled The Ballerina, which may manifest at some point in the future.

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