Fans got some good news during Thursday’s PlayStation State of Play: The John Wick film series is coming to AAA video games. Following the series’ previous, more specialist releases -including Bithell Games’ tactical John Wick Hex and the VR-focused John Wick Chronicles – this iconic hitman is preparing to enter a brave new world with a blockbuster new game from Saber Interactive (the developer of Space Marine 2).
According to Lionsgate, the studio behind the Wick series, an announcement was made one year ago about extending the franchise into gaming with a goal of making a title “targeted to reach both current and new fans of the series”. Whether overdue, or coming right on time, the decision is part of a larger trend across the industry: more intellectual properties are transitioning into fully fledged video game experiences as opposed to simple crossover promotional tie-ins. The John Wick franchise, having been around the block cinematically speaking, has already drawn from a buyout of gaming influences over its capacity to thrill, ticks in the Takswitching boxes in John Wick 2, as well as weapons mastery and combat mechanics plays present in recent entries such as Wick 4 and Ballerina. (Characters like Shamier Anderson’s Tracker, who uses his dog as a weapon, are further evidence that the films have blurred the lines between action you see on screen and action from a game you can directly manipulate.)
Another big name making a return, however, is Castlevania, as Belmont’s Curse was also announced at this event. The 40-year-old series has been on ice and incoherent for more than a decade now after 2014’s Lords of Shadow 2 was released as its last new title, which is coincidentally also the first appearance since the franchise shifted towards animation. Fans were hoping that between Konami showcasing a desire to bring back classic titles (whether via remakes or new iterations in the series), something nowadays could rejuvenate Castelvania’s name, particularly given Netflix’s success with adaptations such as Arcane and Fallout have currently done for those franchises. Scheduled to be published later in the year, Belmont’s Curse will be a trial run of how new game adaptations affect their source material. A few franchises see sales and player engagement to spike after these adaptations, but many do not change much at all. Amazon’s Secret Level, which reorganized into an adaptation house beginning in 2024, hasn’t done much to juice those titles (about video games), and other projects like The Outer Worlds 2 raised hackles from the get-go.
With these new titles, both John Wick and Castlevania are entering uncharted waters. It will be up to Wick to show that the world it creates can be just as immersive as it is cinematic, and for Castlevania to prove that there’s still some of the old creative fire left in its belly, lest it disappear behind other modern adaptations who took the tricks of the series and made them their own. Industry experts agree it’s a high-stakes gamble, but both franchises do have some margin for error: Konami has announced multiple Castlevania projects in the works beyond Belmont’s Curse, and more John Wick movies are already in development. Yet the success of these titles may help determine their fate in an industry where the launch of a strong game can make or break the momentum behind a franchise.
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