At South by Southwest in Austin, Derek Kolstad sat down with an interviewer and delivered news that had been hovering unspoken for years: the Hitman television series is finished. Not coming. Dead in the water.
In an interview with The Direct while attending SXSW, filmmaker Derek Kolstad confirmed the adaptation has been canceled, having been attached to the project as an executive producer and writer. His response, when asked about the show's status, carried the weight of genuine disappointment.
The project itself was announced in November 2017, when Hulu and Fox 21 Television Studios planned to adapt the beloved stealth franchise for TV, with Kolstad set to write the pilot. For a writer of Kolstad's stature, creator of the John Wick franchise, the attachment promised something rare in Hollywood: a creator with demonstrable skill at crafting stylish, emotionally complex action narratives. The pilot script was written. The vision existed.
Then nothing happened. Year after year, nothing.
Fox 21 Television has since been renamed Touchstone Television under Disney's leadership and hasn't produced a new series since 2020. The machinery that was supposed to shepherd Kolstad's vision through to the screen simply ground to a halt. Production decisions were deferred. Showrunner positions went unfilled. Development became the default state, neither alive nor officially dead.
The collapse matters because of context. For years, video game adaptations were widely viewed as Hollywood cash grabs, often drawing poor reviews, but the 2020s have dramatically reshaped that reputation as studios began investing more heavily in faithful, high-quality adaptations. On the TV side, critically acclaimed series such as The Last of Us, Fallout, and Arcane have demonstrated how faithfully adapting game lore can resonate with both critics and general audiences.
Hitman's earlier attempts at the big screen offer cautionary context. The 2007 film Hitman, which starred Timothy Olyphant as Agent 47, was mocked by critics and earned a 16% score on Rotten Tomatoes, and the 2015 film Hitman: Agent 47 starring Rupert Friend was heavily criticized, earning an 8% rating. The franchise carries the burden of those failures.
Yet Kolstad's approach seemed genuinely thoughtful. He wrote episodes one and two, introducing a character to the post-modern world very much like The Third Man meets Three Days in the Condor, introducing a guy who's very much the hitman from the games but with a full head of hair and independent. This was someone trying to find the human story inside an inhuman character, the kind of creative grounding that has worked for the recent wave of successful adaptations.
The question now is what might have been. IO Interactive confirmed the Hitman franchise will eventually return following 2021's Hitman 3, though a major installment may not happen for a long time. The games themselves continue to thrive. But the television show, the one that came so close to existing, remains in the graveyard of Hollywood development.