When John Wick arrived in theaters in 2014 on a budget of just $20 million, Keanu Reeves’ precision-driven gun-fu and sustained-take choreography revolutionized action filmmaking almost overnight. Word of mouth turned that modest budget into an $86 million worldwide gross, and the franchise has since crossed $1 billion at the global box office, a staggering run for a movie built around a stolen car and a dead dog. That success sent Hollywood chasing the same fighting style and neon-drenched settings, and a wave of copycats followed within a few years, from Polar to Kate to Gunpowder Milkshake. Most of them failed. One film, however, got everything right, and it happened to open in theaters nine years ago today.
Atomic Blonde released on July 28, 2017, with a pedigree other copycats lacked. David Leitch, who co-directed the original John Wick before stepping out on his own, built the story around Lorraine Broughton (Charlize Theron), an MI6 agent sent into Berlin days before the fall of the Wall to recover a stolen list of double agents. Her uneasy ally, David Percival (James McAvoy), is an embedded station chief whose loyalties blur as the mission unravels. Based on the graphic novel The Coldest City by Antony Johnston and Sam Hart, the film had a $30 million budget, a fraction of most studio action tentpoles, but it still managed to deliver breathtaking set pieces by pairing Leitch’s fight direction with a star willing to execute nearly all of her own stunts.
Atomic Blonde earns the comparison to John Wick by matching its predecessor’s commitment to single-take scenes instead of quick-cut spectacle. For example, the film’s nearly ten-minute stairwell sequence, stitched together from roughly forty takes to create the illusion of one continuous shot, shows Broughton fighting her way up and down an apartment building before spilling out onto the street and into a hijacked police car. Theron performed the overwhelming majority of those stunts herself, and the exhaustion written across her face by the sequence’s end reads as genuine. That commitment to authenticity is precisely what separated Atomic Blonde from the John Wick knockoffs that followed it, and the choreography carries genuine weight because the camera lingers long enough to show the audience exactly what’s happening.
The film applies the same philosophy to its second major set piece, a fight originally scripted as a struggle inside an airport elevator before Leitch reworked it into a confined car chase for a more dynamic showdown. The scene keeps Broughton and her attacker locked in a tight space while the vehicle spins through Berlin traffic, with choreography being perfectly intertwined with the moving plot. Ultimately, Atomic Blonde succeeds exactly because Leitch treats every fight as a narrative beat with consequences, matching the philosophy that made John Wick a success. That level of execution makes Atomic Blonde‘s long-stalled sequel plans particularly frustrating.
Atomic Blonde turned a profit without becoming a blockbuster franchise. Against its $30 million budget, the film earned $100 million worldwide, a return solid enough to justify the investment but far short of the numbers that typically fast-track a sequel into immediate production. Furthermore, the film’s Rotten Tomatoes profile shows a 79% critics score against a 64% audience score, a gap that suggests reviewers embraced Theron’s performance more readily than general moviegoers did. Those numbers leave Atomic Blonde in an uncomfortable position, successful enough to warrant a sequel, but not well-regarded enough to make the sequel a priority.
Talk of an Atomic Blonde follow-up began almost immediately, with Theron and the production team pursuing a script at Netflix as early as 2018, and Theron confirmed in later interviews that she had pitched the project directly to former Netflix film chief Scott Stuber. Development continued in fits and starts for years without a greenlight, and unresolved rights issues have kept the project from advancing past the writing stage. Theron addressed the sequel’s status again in Elle‘s Summer 2026 cover story, telling the magazine, “I think we might’ve passed the moment,” a stark shift from the cautiously optimistic tone she and Leitch struck for years. Instead of the Atomic Blonde franchise Leitch and screenwriter Kurt Johnstad once envisioned as a multi-film series, the property now sits in the same limbo that has swallowed dozens of other promising action projects before it.
Atomic Blonde is currently available to stream in its entirety on HBO Max.
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