Elevator pitch marketing rarely works as hard as this. Deadline reports that New Line Cinema has picked up the latest feature project from John Wick director Chad Stahelski. That project is called Classified, which according to the report has been pitched as “Die Hard meets Indiana Jones.”
There’s apparently a secret government bunker and World War II-era artifacts that are “more powerful and dangerous than ever imagined” involved (the Indiana Jones part) and blustery action spills and thrills (the Die Hard part), but we know very little else about the premise. What we do know is that the screenplay has been cooked up by collaborators Andrew Deutschman and Jason Pagan, who previously wrote Project Almanac and Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension.
It all seems a little uninspired, but if anyone can turn the idea into a hit, it’s Stahelski, whose keen directorial eye has helped John Wick to become one of the most recognizable new action franchises of the last decade. Stahelski is an in-demand director though. He’s currently working on two more John Wick outings (scheduled to arrive in 2022 and 2023), as well as heading up a reboot of the long-running Highlander franchise (which is expected to spawn a trilogy), and he’s also been attached to several other comic and book adaptations over the past few years, though we haven’t heard much about those.
