Hulu Axes Long-Awaited Hitman Series After Years in Limbo
Announced back in 2017, the long-gestating series is finally moving ahead, filmmaker Derek Kolstad confirms.
Rough weekend for genre projects at Hulu. First came word that the Buffy the Vampire Slayer reboot isn’t happening after all, even with Sarah Michelle Gellar back for the pilot and Oscar winner Chloe Zhao involved. And now another long-gestating Hulu project just hit the wall too: Hitman.
Hulu’s Hitman series is officially done
Derek Kolstad — the guy who launched the first three John Wick movies and wrote both Nobody films — had been developing a live-action Hitman series for Hulu since 2017. It survived years of starts and stops, then ran straight into a pandemic, a writers strike, and an actors strike. After all of that, Kolstad says the project is dead.
"No... it’s a little bit of a dagger in the chest... it’s dead in the water. Man, I love that game and I love that character."
He also laid out the blunt reality of getting anything made right now:
"I can write a screenplay, but no one’s going to go out and buy the screenplay. You’ve got to make the movie, you’ve got to make the show. But nothing’s happening with that, sadly."
Normally, the words dead and hitman belong in the same sentence for better reasons. Not this time.
Why this one stings (and also, maybe doesn’t)
There’s plenty of story meat in IO Interactive’s series — eight mainline games plus spinoffs — so a TV version always felt like a solid fit. That said, Hollywood’s track record with Agent 47 is... not great.
In 2007, Timothy Olyphant’s Hitman made $101.2 million worldwide on a reported $24 million budget, then got leveled by critics with a 16% positive score on Rotten Tomatoes. The 2015 redo, Hitman: Agent 47 with Rupert Friend, earned $82.3 million on a $35 million budget and sank even lower with an 8% score. Ouch.
The weird twist is that TV has recently figured out how to make video game worlds work: The Last of Us, Fallout, Twisted Metal — different tones, all successful in their own ways. Whether Hulu cooled on Hitman or Kolstad’s version just wasn’t clicking remains unclear.
For now, Agent 47 stays in his natural habitat: the games. If someone takes another shot down the line, the runway is there. Just maybe not at Hulu, and not today.