The last time we saw any movement on The Continental, the John Wick spin-off show, it was when Starz stepped in to pick up the series in January of 2018. We’ve gotten a whole John Wick sequel since then, but we’re apparently no closer to actually seeing the movie’s super-assassins on our TV screens. Speaking at a Television Critics Association event, Starz boss Jeffrey Hirsch explained that the goal for the show is to avoid “[interfering] with the movies,” and because of that it most likely won’t premiere until after John Wick 4 is released. As we learned last year, that’s not happening until May 21, 2021, so it’ll probably be over a year before The Continental ends up happening.
But here’s an interesting thing to think about: We’re living in a post-John Wick: Chapter 3 world, and that movie pretty much blew up what we thought we knew about The Continental (New York’s secret assassin hotel/safe house) and its manager, Ian McShane’s Winston. In the first two movies, Winston was one of the few reliable allies that John Wick had, but in the end of Chapter 3, he betrays Wick in order to reassert his important to the High Table (the assassin world’s governing body). The movie then sets up the next sequel by having Wick and Laurence Fishburne’s Bowery King team up to go to war against Winston and the High Table. In other words, setting a story around The Continental now, with its boss revealing himself to be more of a jerk than we previously thought, is a little more interesting than it would’ve been before.
That being said, John Wick being John Wick, we wouldn’t put our money on Winston winning this fight against the Baba Yaga. If Ian McShane gets killed, the Continental TV show could bring in some cheaper actor to be the hotel’s new manager and reestablish it as a nice place that good-guy assassins can trust while Wick goes on to some new adventure in the inevitable fifth movie. Of course, we won’t know how that shakes out until after John Wick 4, so it makes perfect sense for Starz to want to hold off on this project for now.