John Wick’s David Leitch to direct Charlize Theron in The Coldest City

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

After the success of JOHN WICK, David Leitch and Chad Stahelski were set to reunite on the JOHN WICK sequel as well as THE COLDEST CITY, a spy thriller which will star Charlize Theron. However, as we found out last month, Chad Stahelski will be directing the JOHN WICK sequel solo due to David Leitch's commitments on a different project. That different project turned out to be THE COLDEST CITY, which The Wrap reports will now be directed solely by David Leitch.

Splitting up the JOHN WICK team can be attributed to Charlize Theron, who found herself with a window to shoot THE COLDEST CITY this fall, which unfortunately conflicted with the production of the JOHN WICK sequel and led to Stahelski and Leitch splitting JOHN WICK 2 and THE COLDEST CITY between them. Based upon the best-selling Oni Press graphic novel by Antony Johnston, THE COLDEST CITY will star Charlize Theron as a spy who must find a list that a murdered MI6 officer was smuggling out of East Berlin in order to protect herself and the counter-intelligence community.

Amazon's description of the graphic novel:

November 1989. Communism is collapsing, and soon the Berlin Wall will come down with it. But before that happens there is one last bit of cloak & dagger to attend to. Two weeks ago, an undercover MI6 officer was killed in Berlin. He was carrying information from a source in the East – a list that allegedly contains the name of every espionage agent working in Berlin, on all sides. No list was found on his body. Now Lorraine Broughton, an experienced spy with no pre-existing ties to Berlin, has been sent into this powderkeg of social unrest, counter-espionage, defections gone bad and secret assassinations to bring back the list and save the lives of the British agents whose identities reside on it.

Production on THE COLDEST CITY will kick off on November 16 in Budapest before moving to Berlin.