News culture This John Wick-style action film grossed $100 million at the box office, but the sequel won't see the light of day on Netflix for a long time!
“Atomic Blonde,” the high-octane action film helmed by Charlize Theron and directed by one of the filmmakers behind John Wick, should logically be entitled to a Netflix-produced sequel. But the future of this project is currently unclear.
Fall into oblivion
After the success of the first part of “John Wick”, director David Leitch decided to stand on his own two feet and make “Atomic Blonde”, an action film very similar to the saga of Keanu Reeves, this time directed by Charlize Theron. A loose adaptation of the graphic novel “The Coldest City,” “Atomic Blonde” doesn't reinvent the wheel, but it still manages to distance itself from its counterpart, whose story is anchored in Germany at the end of the Cold War. High-energy action, a gripping espionage intrigue, a few humorous sequences… everything it took for the feature film to shine at the box office. With an estimated budget of around $30 million, the film grossed over $100 million. A great success that could legitimately have led to the start of work on a sequel. This new part actually became very concrete before it was forgotten.
A compromised sequel?
A few years after the success of “Atomic Blonde,” Netflix decided to acquire the rights to the film to begin producing a sequel. In 2020, Charlize Theron even claimed that the project had been validated by the platform and writing had begun.
We picked up “Atomic Blonde 2” and presented it to Scott Stuber, head of Netflix original feature production. We talked to him a lot and only recently started writing the script. In the first film, the character was portrayed 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 The direct one. According to the filmmaker, it is the issue of rights management that is preventing Netflix from fully starting production.
Everyone is still trying to work out 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 thing Property is and it would be great to go back and revisit this world and this character. So I hope we can do it…
So for now, we'll have to be patient and wait until a studio manages to get their hands on the rights to Atomic Blonde in full in order to fully release this sequel.
