I have to be honest — the newly released trailer alone for Peacock’s The Killer, the streamer’s upcoming feature film remake of the classic John Woo movie, looks better than most of the actual complete movies that Netflix has released for a few years now.
I don’t know what’s difficult for a company to understand about this concept. The quality of your output when you decide to do a few things, and do them well, will almost always surpass the results of what you get when volume is the name of the game. Peacock, obviously, is nowhere near the size of its competitors in terms of subscribers or output. Regardless, it’s home to a ton of great content that I feel like not enough people know about, including The Traitors, Ted, The Continental, Poker Face, Those About to Die, and more.
Those titles, by the way, also have at least one thing in common: They’re all series, whereas The Killer is a Peacock original movie, something there hasn’t been very much of on the service up to this point. The Woo original came out back in 1989, and it’s here that I should interject that Woo himself — the director of films like Face/Off and Mission: Impossible 2 — came back to direct Peacock’s English-language remake, which debuts on Aug. 23.
The Killer stars Game of Thrones’ Nathalie Emmanuel as Zee, a mysterious and infamous assassin known throughout the Parisian underworld as the “Queen of the Dead.”
Peacock’s summary continues: “But when, during an assignment from her shadowy mentor and handler (Avatar’s Sam Worthington), Zee refuses to kill a blinded young woman (Diana Silvers; Ma, Booksmart) in a Paris nightclub, the decision will disintegrate Zee’s alliances, attract the attention of a savvy police investigator (Golden Globe nominee Omar Sy; Jurassic World franchise, Lupin), and plunge her into a sinister criminal conspiracy that will set her on a collision course with her own past.”
As a subscriber to Peacock immediately following its launch in mid-2020, I’ve got to say: The release of a title like The Killer makes me feel incredibly optimistic about the future of the service and in particular its upcoming release slate.
