'John Wick' spinoff series 'The Continental' to focus on young Winston

"The Continental", the TV spinoff to Keanu Reeves-starrer action franchise, is set 40 years before the first movie and focuses on a young Winston, the owner of the famous hotel for assassins.

Lionsgate TV chairman Kevin Beggs said "The Continental" will have only three 90-minute episodes, reported Deadline.

Beggs said there were different pitches but they finally settled on the current plotline as they did not want the spinoff to impact the future installments of the movie in any way. The winning pitch came from the creative team of the show Wayne, a YouTube Premium exclusive.

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"We were really blown away because it solved a bunch of problems and was super exciting, about a crumbling New York in the 1970s with a garbage strike that has piled up bags of garbage to the third floor of most brownstones...

"...the mafia muscling in on that business which is why in The Sopranos he’s in the sanitation business, and other things that are really real as an interesting backdrop to explore the origins of The Continental which is famously within the movie franchise the assassin's hotel in which you cannot kill anyone on the hotel grounds, but of course if you step one foot off you’re fair game, and that’s employed to great effect in many of the plots in the movies. Running all of that is Winston," he explained.

In the movies, Winston is played by Ian McShane.

Beggs said they are exploring a young Wilson in "The Continental" and "how it came to be that he and his team of confederates found their way into this hotel which we have met for the first time in the movie franchise 40 years later."

"That’s the arena. I won’t give away more than that, but Starz really leaned into this take also, and they have been great collaborators. And how we’ve approached this first season is as three essentially 90-minute events which you could construe as a limited series or a limited event series.”

Reeves may not be in front of the camera but he is in talks to executive produce the series.

The series has no release date but the fourth film is slated to release on May 27, 2022.