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Lionsgate and Starbreeze team up to bring ‘John Wick’ to virtual reality
Despite making double its expected opening box office gross, the 2014 Keanu Reeves action flick John Wick still seems like a strange film to be getting a game adaptation that is not a direct tie-in, and it would seem even stranger for it to be making its way into virtual reality, but that is exactly what Lions Gate Entertainment Corp plans on doing through its newly announced partnership with Starbreeze Studios. The game will be a first-person shooter entered around the Continental Hotel location from the film and will be released for Valve Corp’s HTC Vive VR headset.
“This movie lends itself to VR because it’s a self-contained set in many of the scenes,” Peter Levin, the head of games at Lionsgate, told GamesBeat. “Starbreeze is perfect for this because they’re one of the best first-person shooter teams out there. John Wick screams for a game.”
In a statement, Levin also said that the studio hopes “a cutting edge VR game will deepen fan engagement and accelerate John Wick’s evolution into one of our next big action franchises.”
Starbreeze is perhaps best known for its work on the popular Payday heist games, and the studio has previously added a John Wick character pack DLC to Payday 2, which Starbreeze said was received very well by its fans.
“Lionsgate is a leader in producing and delivering the kind of provocative, original and engaging storytelling that you need to launch an exhilarating and marketable game,” said Starbreeze CEO Bo Andersson Klint in a statement. “The John Wick characters and universe really resonated with our Payday fans last year when we first incorporated them into our game, so we’re thrilled to partner with the studio and the John Wick creative team to create a new standalone game enhanced by the state of the art in virtual reality.”
According to the statement, Lionsgate is also currently developing a John Wick sequel that is currently projected for release in September 2016. There are no details yet on when the John Wick VR game would be hitting the market, but it seems likely that the date would be close to the release of the next film.
Image courtesy of Lions Gate Entertainment Corp
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