In 2017, one of Charlize Theron’s best movies, and one of the best action movies in general, arrived in the form of Atomic Blonde, which was set before the fall of the Berlin Wall and saw the actress playing a spy sent to retrieve a stolen list of intelligence agents active in Berlin. The movie was met with a lot of positive critical reception, including the 3.5 out of 5 score from CinemaBlend’s Atomic Blonde review, and by April 201, Theron said a sequel was in development. However, there have been few updates on Atomic Blonde 2 since then, and writer Kurt Johnstad shared his hope of how many sequels are ultimately made while talking with CinemaBlend about why working on that first movie was so “special” to him.
While the majority of my recent interview with Johnstad was centered around his new movie Rebel Moon: Part Two - The Scargiver, which is now playing to Netflix subscribers on the 2024 release schedule, I capped off our conversation by asking him where things stand on Atomic Blonde 2, noting how the sequel has also been set up at Netflix for a while now.
Johnstad informed me that he hasn’t been “brought in” on that project and that Charlize Theron’s production company Denver & Delilah Productions Inc. “control” it, so it’s possible “they may have gone to another writer, they may have a draft,” he’s just not sure. But he explained that when he was writing the first movie, he always had a clear vision in mind for what he wanted a series of movies to look like.
To me, I always said that’s a trilogy. You could tell three of those, and I hope they crack it. And if they need some help, they know where to find me.
While Atomic Blonde was a theatrical release, Atomic Blonde 2 has been slated as a Netflix project since 2020, which is fitting since Charlize Theron has worked with the streamer on The Old Guard, The School for Good and Evil and the upcoming The Old Guard 2 (which still doesn’t have a release date). However, the last major update on Atomic Blonde 2 came back in December 2022, when producer Kelly McCormick said that “some of the delay” stemmed from wanting to ensure the sequel is done “right.” Evidently that’s still where things stand with it, but Kurt Johnstad is still hopeful that Atomic Blonde 2 and even a hypothetical Atomic Blonde 3 are made someday, and he’s willing to come aboard to lend assistance if necessary.
As for the first movie, Johnstad went over how much that script means to him, and how director David Leitch, who’d made his directorial debut alongside Chad Stahelski with 2014’s John Wick, was instantly game to helm Atomic Blonde. As the writer recalled:
It was a fantastic script at a time in my career, and I was really able to bring it to my friends Chad Stahelski and Dave Leitch. They were just at the beginning, they had just done John Wick, but I’ve known them for probably 25 years. Chad was the fight choreographer on 300, Dave Leitch… he was a stuntman, but he was [also] a Spartan actor in 300. So I’ve known these guys since the mid-‘90s, and they’re friends and now they’re both successful directors, and it brought me nothing but joy to then when Dave was like, ‘Ok, I’m gonna make this movie, Chad went to do John Wick 2.’ To watch Dave just embrace this script that was written... it had all the elements that Dave wanted, but then we really leaned into Dave’s sensibilities as a director and just made it fun and cool and put in all the needle drops with the music. And just the design of the movie, he made it his own. It’s a special movie.
Charlize Theron was joined in Atomic Blonde by James McAvoy, Til Schweiger, Eddie Marsan and Sofia Boutella, among others. In addition to the positive reception, the movie also did pretty for itself commercially, making $100 million worldwide off a $30 million budget. It’s hard to say at this point if Atomic Blonde 2 will ever see the light of day, but even if it doesn’t, at least that first movie remains an entertaining watch on its own.
In addition to The Old Guard 2, Charlize Theron also has Fast XI coming up on April 4, 2025. For those of you interested in Kurt Johnstad’s work on Rebel Moon: Part Two, read what he had to tell me about where things on Part Three stand, as well as his breakdown of The Scargiver’s major deaths and what’s next for the characters Kora and Balisarius.
