John Wick spinoff The Continental to explore Winston's childhood

The Continental, the small screen spinoff to Keanu Reeves' popular action franchise, John Wick, will be set 40 years before the first movie and will trace the journey of young Winston, the owner of the famous hotel for assassins.

According to reports, the spinoff will have only three 90-minute episodes. Apparently, there were different pitches but the makers at Lionsgate TV are said to have settled on the current plotline as they did not want the spinoff to impact the future big-screen instalments in any way.

The winning pitch is from the creative team of the show Wayne, a YouTube Premium exclusive.

"We were really blown away because it solved a bunch of problems and was super exciting, about a crumbling New York in the 1970s with a garbage strike that has piled up bags of garbage to the third floor of most brownstones. The Continental  is the name of the assassin's hotel in the franchise, in which you cannot kill anyone on the hotel grounds, but of course, if you step one foot off you're fair game, and that's employed to great effect in many of the plots in the movies. Running all of that is Winston," the statement from the makers reads.

In the movie franchise, Winston is played by Ian McShane.

"We have approached this first season is as three essentially 90-minute events which you could construe as a limited series or a limited event series. Reeves may not be in front of the camera but he is in talks to executive produce the series," the statement clarified.

The series has not been given a release date yet, but the fourth film in the franchise is slated for release on May 27, 2022.