Kid Cudi joins new John Woo movie Silent Night, a movie that may no longer be silent

Back in October, we heard that John Woo was getting ready to break an 18-year streak of avoiding Hollywood with Silent Night, an action movie starring Joel Kinnaman that would supposedly have zero dialogue—pair that with a Christmas setting and you’ve got… Silent Night. The plot of the film, which was pitched as “basic” originally, involves Kinnaman playing a father out for revenge after his young son is accidentally caught in the crossfire of a gang shooting on Christmas Eve. (It’s being produced by Thunder Road Films, which does the John Wick movies, but it’s worth noting that there is a fine line between “something like John Wick” and “something like Death Wish,” so we hope this is more like the former.)

Deadline is now reporting that Kinnaman will be joined by Scott “Kid Cudi” Mescudi in the film, with Kid Cudi playing a cop named Dennis Vassel (not super important, but that’s good for any Dennis fans out there). What the Deadline story does not specifically say, though, is whether or not Silent Night is still meant to be an entirely dialogue-free film. There was no screenwriter attached when the project was announced, but there is one now (Robert Lynn), and screenwriters tend to… you know, write dialogue.

A Hollywood Reporter story on Kid Cudi being cast in the film also doesn’t mention whether or not the movie is still going to have no talking, so there’s a chance that the movie is still going to have at least some talking. Maybe it’s like the “it’s a show about nothing!” pitch from Seinfeld that Jerry and George quickly had to walk back, and John Woo was going around to the studios saying “it’s called Silent Night and there’s no talking!” until he realized that something like that—without the retro conceit of The Artist—might not be super easy to pull off.