The next Rainbow Six film is going to have no less than John Wick’s director at the helm.
Christ Stahelski is best known today as the director of the John Wick films, but his pedigree in action movies goes far deeper than most fans can even imagine. He got his start studying martial arts with Brandon Lee, at the Inosanto Academy, AKA the martial arts school of Bruce’s top student, Dan Inosanto.
Sadly, his proper start in movies came from the fallout of the Brandon’s passing at the set of the 1994 The Crow movie. He was tapped to be one of Brandon’s stand-ins, while CG was used to recreate Brandon’s face.
This started a 20 year career as stuntman and stunt coordinator, ultimately making his way to Hollywood’ws biggest films, as well as cult classics.
Just to give you a taste of Chris’ filmography:
- Escape From L.A.
- The Hunted
- Van Helsing
- Spider-Man 2
- Constantine
- Mr & Mrs Smith
- Serenity
- V for Vendetta
- 300
- X-Men Origins: Wolverine
- Iron Man 2
- Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Christ Stahelski joins this project alongside Michael B. Jordan. Michael B. Jordan was introduced as John Clark in the first Tom Clancy movie, Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse, produced by Paramount and an army of partners, including Skydance, and distributor Amazon Studios.
However, these movies, as well as the Jack Ryan TV show that preceded it, were all produced in conjunction with Ubisoft. Ubisoft acquired the perpetual rights to use Tom Clancy’s name for branding on their video games, as well as media connected to them, including books and movies.
The end of Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse hinted at the start of Project Rainbow, so even though Without Remorse itself was based on Clancy’s original novel, the coming movie is more likely to have a close, even direct connection to Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six.
Now, the hardcore Rainbow Six fans likely already knew that John Clark is himself the operator with the callsign Rainbow Six, and is the lead character in Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six video games produced by Ubisoft. It would be pretty much a given that Ubisoft would have given the go-signal for this new movie with these high profile talents, if they were not directly involved in the production in some way themselves.
Unfortunately, this comes at a bad time for Ubisoft. They had recently revealed plans to cancel several video games, including what would have been a Tom Clancy VR game. Perhaps the success of this spinoff media would boomerang back into interest in new Tom Clancy video games.
Source: Video Games Chronicle