Posted in: TV | Tagged: bleeding cool, cable, Content Panda, Jung Byung-Gil, Next Entertainment World, robert kirkman, skybound, streaming, television, the villainess, tv

'The Villainess': Skybound Entertainment to Adapt Korean Action Movie for TV Series

Robert Kirkman's production company Skybound Entertainment has acquired the rights to the Korean action movie The Villainess for television. The series will center on a woman who was kidnapped from Korea and raised to become an assassin in Los Angeles before discovering the truth about her past and returning to Korea for a reckoning. Jung Byung-Gil is expected to direct the pilot of the remake and is working with US producers on the project.

Premiering at the Cannes Film Festival in 2017, The Villainess is about a woman trained to be a government assassin since her teens, sent out into the world with a new identity to carry out sanctioned hits before she discovers her entire life is a lie and ends up fighting the government agency that trained her.

The movie earned a cult reputation from action movie fans worldwide with its over-the-top action scenes that surprised viewers with the way its characters hurled themselves across the screen and the places the camera went with its elaborately choreographed set-pieces–often without the use of CGI fakery. It took the type of action mayhem that John Woo and Hong Kong movies used to make and cranked it up even further. It's a version of La Femme Nikita–with even crazier melodrama because that's what Korean drama does.

The opening of the movie was an extended action sequence shot completely from the point of view of the heroine as she goes on a murderous rampage with a gun. It's unbroken and looks like the most intense Call of Duty: Modern Warfare level you've ever seen a Twitch streamer play. It put director Byung-Gil on the map. There are at least three more action sequences in the rest of the movie that are just as crazy, if not more so. You watch this movie and end up wondering how they made it without anybody dying or getting maimed for real.

"Jung Byung-gil has quickly established himself as one of the world's great action directors, and we're incredibly excited to be working with him to expand the world of The Villainess into a thrilling international series."

– Bryan and Sean Furst, Co-Presidents, TV/Film, Skybound Entertainment

Skybound will be partnering with Next Entertainment World's Content Panda to co-produce the US TV remake.

"We expect that The Villainess, which made a successful debut in Cannes Film Festival, will bring special entertainment and fun to the audience with its rich stories of the genre, and through the partnership with Skybound Entertainment, already well-known for The Walking Dead."

– Kim Jae-min, Contents Panda

Several studios and production companies were competing for the US remake rights to The Villainess since its premiere at Cannes. It's not such a big surprise that Skybound Entertainment got it when you consider Kirkman's taste for over-the-top genre fare – after all, on top of The Walking Dead and Invincible, he wrote the gleefully-violent Image Comics action series DIE! DIE! DIE!

If you want to see the original 2017 movie before the adulterated US remake comes along, you can find it on Blu-Ray, DVD, and on-demand services; and streaming on Hulu.

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