Wildman: John Wick Energy Meets Bigfoot Vengeance Now

What happens when John Wick's relentless fury meets a lumbering, mythic force of nature? Wildman, the new revenge thriller queuing up at the intersection of hyper-stylized action and folktale horror, aims to find out.

The logline is blunt and brutal: after hunters kill his smaller brother, a giant Bigfoot embarks on a single-minded quest — to recover the body and slaughter everyone responsible. It’s a revenge story, but not the kind told in glass-and-steel hotel lobbies. Think muddy clearings, snapped trees, and violence that feels as ancient as the forest itself.

Behind the project is Badlands, led by Scott Streiss, operating in close creative orbit with Thunder Road veterans Basil Iwanyk and Erica Lee. They’ve secured the rights to Wildman and will shepherd the script by Texas newcomer Jacob Reiner toward production. Reiner’s screenplay caught attention not in a studio lot but on the internet, in a contest with teeth: Scriptshadow.net’s Blood and Ink competition, run by critic and editor Carson Reeves.

Reeves highlighted scripts that stood out, and Wildman made that shortlist. From there the script landed on Jack Wagner’s desk at Alibi Entertainment. Wagner reached out, negotiations moved fast, and what began as a passionate entry from a writer obsessed with Bigfoot became Reiner’s first professional sale. Reeves, meanwhile, is stepping into the movie as an executive producer.

There’s something deliciously subversive about the premise. The movie promises the kinetic choreography and moral clarity of modern action cinema — the kind that made John Wick a shorthand for precision mayhem — but re-cast that template with a nonhuman protagonist whose motives are elemental and uncompromising. Who do you root for? Who do you fear? The film already sets up a heady tension between empathy and spectacle.

Casting, tone, and director remain open questions. Will Wildman lean hard into horror, or maintain that sleek action pulse? Will the creature be a motion-captured, tragic antihero or a practical-effects terror? The answers will shape whether this is a clever stunt or the start of something weirder and more enduring.

Either way, Wildman is a reminder that fresh ideas often arrive from unexpected places — a message board contest, a passionate fandom, a regional writer with a specific obsession — and that sometimes the best way to rework a beloved formula is to swap the protagonist for a legend and let the chaos follow.