The long-discussed big-screen adaptation of the original Kane & Lynch game, developed by the renowned Hitman studio IO Interactive and released in 2007, has been a topic of speculation for years. This potential film has seen various Hollywood stars linked to it at different stages of its development.
This week, Timo Tjahjanto, the director of Nobody 2, took to social media to share that he had crafted a treatment for the Kane & Lynch film, envisioning David Harbour—known for his roles as Jim Hopper in Stranger Things and Red Guardian in Thunderbolts/New Avengers—as one of the leads. "Never seen a script, but a couple of years ago when that property was still kinda hot. I wrote a short treatment with James Badge Dale and David Harbour in mind," Tjahjanto disclosed. "Never gotten anywhere."
The Kane & Lynch movie project appears to be dead in the water. Tjahjanto's treatment, a document used to pitch a film idea to a studio, is just one of many that never progressed to a full script.
Over the years, the film had been linked to high-profile actors like Bruce Willis and Jamie Foxx, both of whom were attached to the project at one point before dropping out due to numerous script rewrites. Another iteration reportedly planned to feature Gerard Butler and Vin Diesel in the lead roles, but this too never came to fruition.
Following the lukewarm reception of the 2010 game sequel, Kane & Lynch: Dog Days, IO Interactive shifted its focus entirely to the Hitman franchise, effectively putting the Kane & Lynch series on the back burner.