https://deadline.com/2024/05/john-wi...te-1235917560/

I'd kinda like a prequel with him while he still looks pretty good. How he came to be in with the High Table and his past relationship with Wick, before people start to come after his daughter to get to him.

The John Wick universe is way too elaborate. There are assassins everywhere! I want a spin-off where the protagonist is a "regular" person who learns that everyone around him is either an assassin or someone involved in that shadowy world. Family, friends, coworkers, 7/11 cashiers, etc. And he's absolutely horrified at all the terrible violence happening around him. This would probably need to be a comedy.

Yen commands the screen in everything he does. From the Ip Man series to Rogue One. he is just so good.

I guess Akira was unsuccessful in the post-credit scene from JW4.

You had me at Donnie Yen.

You knew that was coming when they revealed the scene was trimmed down to eliminate his actual death.

Ah… I didn’t know that.

Hopefully this arrives on a quicker timeline than The Ballerina is on.

It would be cool if they got Donnie Yen to direct. Teddy Chan or Wilson Yip would also be good choices.

Yeah, the end to Caine's arc was meant to

However, Stahelski changed his mind, reasoning the film had enough of a

Yen has also stated he'd like the film to feature Caine and Akira as reluctant allies.

Man, even when it’s to a franchise I like (don’t like this one much) I’m so sick of everyone and their dog getting a spin off. It’s so tiresome.

For me, Caine is pretty much the only one worthy of a spin off.

you don't ike the IP and you don't like the idea of a spin-off... and you came here to tell us that?

I thought maybe there would be a continuation with Tracker.

I don't think the dog's getting a spin-off.

Dog: A John Wick Animated Series.

Give them time.

Already had a spin-off.

https://collider.com/john-wick-spino...recting-caine/

Lionsgate also greenlit the Caine spinoff. Yen is directing

https://variety.com/2025/film/news/k...&utm_id=597330

I know they won't do it because many Americans don't like reading subtitles, but it would be cool if they made the entire movie in Cantonese. Make it a truly gritty Hong Kong style action thriller.

With Yen directing, it'd be cool if he did exactly that. I wonder if this project is why he finally gave up on Sleeping Dogs.

That’s a really decent idea. I doubt the studio would go all in because they’d probably want some big names in the cast aside from Yen, in keeping with the, ahem, ‘international’ feel of that world. Setting the whole film in Hong Kong would be cool, and the kind of ‘Wick world’ characters that might congregate there wouldn’t necessarily all be Hong Kongers anyway. The articles say “filming begins in” Hong Kong, so I guess we’ll see what that means, and how much of Yen’s ties to the mainland will be a factor. I’m curious how dangerous he’ll be ‘allowed’ to portray present-day Hong Kong, even in an obvious fantasy manner and presumably with all outside funding.

I kinda wondered if THE PROSECUTOR wasn’t basically a demo reel. At that point he hadn’t full-on directed a film in 20 years, and that previous venture PROTEGE DE LA ROSE NOIR was an odd thing co-directed by then relative newcomer Barbara Wong (a specialist in lightweight fare both before and after). Yen’s action design was the drawing card, and the film seemed like a launching pad for his sister that didn’t really pan out. You have to go back six years earlier than that to find Yen’s best directorial efforts, which were his first three: LEGEND OF THE WOLF (mentioned in some articles posted a while back), BALLISTIC KISS, and SHANGHAI AFFAIRS. For the era, and their indie budgets, they’re pretty solid comic book-ish adventures, but I’d wager if anyone was going to give Yen the reins on a Hollywood movie all these decades later, he needed to prove he still had skills that worked the modern era beyond just top-shelf action design, ergo THE PROSECUTOR.

I’m not entirely convinced this movie was a factor in Yen dumping SLEEPING DOGS, though. As discussed earlier, he’s just too old now and it’s starting to show a bit (probably more than on the similar-aged Reeves)

Prior to The Prosecutor, Yen directed Sakra. Really well done, even if it felt a tad bloated for its runtime. But The Prosecutor is definitely the template I expect for this.

As for Sleeping Dogs, unless he was to be in a prominent supporting role, he had aged out before he even announced the project. So his suddenly dropping out years later feels weird.

SAKRA’s an interesting one. Yen had a co-director on that, Kam Ka-Wai. This guy started as a script supervisor early in his career, which eventually got him onto Wilson Yip’s DRAGON TIGER GATE and FLASH POINT, both starring Yen of course. Then he moved on to second assistant director gigs on several films (including IP MAN 1 and 2), then first assistant director on a bunch of others (non-Yen, I believe), before finally directing his own pictures, mostly forgettable and many produced and/or written by Wong Jing, including 2018’s BIG BROTHER, which starred Donnie Yen. Wong also produced SAKRA.

Wong Jing was famous – or perhaps infamous? – back in the 80’s and probably beyond for letting underlings and lesser ‘names’ direct significant portions of ‘his’ films while he still claimed a ‘directed by’ credit, or sometimes ‘executive director’ or something like that. Given Kam’s generally undistinguished output as a credited main director, and the relatively superior quality of BIG BROTHER and also 2017’s COLOUR OF THE GAME (the third in a loose trilogy of “Wong Jing films”, the other two openly co-directed by Marco Mak and Billy Chung but with Wong being the big name), it’s reasonable to assume Kam Ka-Wai is probably, similarly, a journeyman director who could keep a sizeable production running by handling a lot of dialogue scenes, establishing shots, inserts, maybe some post, etc. under the supervision of Yen so the latter could focus on his patented action sequences and other effects and generally test the waters after 20 years, while allowing Wong could do whatever it is Wong does on so many of his productions (Keep everything on schedule? Hand out paychecks? Play the horses?).

If you look at the credit blocks on Wellgo’s U.S. video sleeves for SAKRA, it says ‘Directed By Donnie Yen’ in the biggest letters right up top, and Kam is kinda buried in with everyone else. The credit block on the German Blu-ray, by comparison, says ‘A Film By Donnie Yen’, similarly largest and at the top (Kam is still buried with everyone else). It’s a subtle distinction, but one that reminds me of so many movies purporting to be “A Film by Wong Jing” that were at least partly directed by others in his employment.

To further confuse the matter, the credit block on the Spanish Blu-ray sleeve lists Yen, Kam, and HK b-movie veteran Steve Cheng Wai-man as co-directors! Not even sure where to begin with that one! HKMDB shows his career drying up around 2006, but IMDb shows it picking up in various mainland China television series circa 2012 and continuing through 2024 (so far). All fanciful period shows, no less, which would certainly put him in proximity to Yen and Wong if they needed an extra hand on SAKRA.

So there are enough fingers in the SAKRA pie to suggest a) that it’s not a full Donnie Yen-directed film (same as ROSE NOIRE in that sense) even though he undoubtedly oversaw the whole thing, and b) that, indeed, PROSECUTOR was the movie he needed to make to prove he could handle this CAINE spinoff. However . . . that can be taken with a grain of salt because, true to Hong Kong tradition, PROSECUTOR listed two ‘executive directors’ in the credits: Mak Ho-Pong, director of his own successful BREAKOUT BROTHERS trilogy and other films, and Terry Ng, another assistant director who moved up to directing his own pictures, though with less success so far.

So basically, who knows who’ll actually be behind the camera when Donnie’s in front of it during the making of CAINE! Kind of a Hong Kong tradition, I suppose.

And while I agree that the announcement that he wouldn’t be doing SLEEPING DOGS was fairly recent, I guess I can’t shake the feeling that he probably came to the conclusion long before that. That ship sailed a long time ago, but maybe he just held on to the property or something?

https://variety.com/2025/film/global...ra-1236386658/

https://deadline.com/2026/03/john-wi...&utm_id=672554

Looks like this is finally moving forward. They are reportedly starting production next month in Hong Kong