LOS ANGELES
One of the most admired crime thrillers of the last decade is getting an English-language remake, and the package forming around it is about as strong as the genre allows. The Hollywood Reporter reported on October 20, 2026 that Keanu Reeves is in talks to star in Paramount's remake of The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil, the 2019 South Korean hit, with James Wan set to direct. The story was covered the same day by Collider and MovieWeb. Reeves' exact role has not been confirmed — the reporting suggests the cop — and that distinction matters, because the film's whole mechanism is the alliance between the two men named in its title.
The original film, directed by Lee Won-tae, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019 and holds a 97 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes. Its premise is a crime-genre machine: a crime boss who survives an attack by a serial killer — the devil of the title — finds himself in a race with the detective hunting the same killer, and the two men, who despise everything about each other, agree to pool their resources and catch him first, each intending to be the one who finishes him. It is a premise built on mutual contempt and shared obsession, and it turned Don Lee — known internationally as Ma Dong-seok — into one of Korean cinema's defining screen presences.
Lee is not being replaced by the remake; he is built into it. Per The Hollywood Reporter's account, Lee co-stars in the new film, again on the gangster side of the story, and serves as a producer. That single decision does more to legitimize the project than any other: the remake keeps the original's most distinctive asset, the actor whose physicality and deadpan menace powered the first film, and pairs him with Reeves — whose own screen persona, from the John Wick films onward, is built on the same economy of stillness and sudden violence. If Reeves does take the cop role, as the reporting suggests, the film becomes a study in two different kinds of controlled fury sharing a car.
Wan returns to directing
For James Wan, the remake is a homecoming of a particular kind. It would be his first feature as a director since Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom in 2023, ending a three-year gap in which he has worked principally as a producer through his Atomic Monster banner. Wan's directing career began in lean, violent genre filmmaking — Saw, Death Sentence, Insidious, The Conjuring — before the billion-dollar scale of Furious 7 and Aquaman. A mid-budget crime thriller about a gangster, a cop and a killer is, on paper, the closest thing on his slate to the director he was before the franchises: contained, nasty, and driven by set-pieces of pursuit rather than spectacle.
The producing bench underlines the intent. The producers include Sylvester Stallone — whose own career supplies half the DNA of the cop-and-criminal alliance genre — and Lorenzo di Bonaventura, the Paramount veteran behind the Transformers and G.I. Joe franchises, alongside Lee. The screenplay has passed through serious hands: the current draft is by Eric Pearson, who wrote Fantastic Four: First Steps, following earlier drafts by Shay Hatten, a John Wick franchise writer whose presence connects the remake to Reeves' own series, and Brian Helgeland, the Oscar-winning writer of L.A. Confidential. Remakes that cycle through writers of that caliber are being built to last, not to fill a slot.
Why this remake, why now
English-language remakes of Korean hits have a mixed commercial history, which is precisely why the talent matters here. The project has been in development at Paramount in various forms since the original's Cannes reception, and what has changed is the top of the call sheet: a director with Wan's genre credentials, a star of Reeves' global standing, and the original's breakout actor retained rather than recast. The 97 percent Rotten Tomatoes score gives the marketing a verified critical halo; the premise gives the trailer a one-sentence pitch that works in any language, which is more or less the point of the exercise.
For Reeves, the role would extend a run in which he has become the defining action star of his generation by underplaying: the John Wick films turned restraint into a style, and the cop in Lee Won-tae's story is written in the same register — a man whose obsession makes him willing to break every rule his badge represents. Opposite Lee, whose gangster survives on bulk, humor and wounded pride, the pairing sets up the film's central bargain in purely physical terms before a line of dialogue is spoken.
Nothing about Reeves' deal is final — he is in talks, per The Hollywood Reporter, and neither his role nor a production start has been officially confirmed by Paramount. Those are the facts as reported by THR and corroborated by Collider and MovieWeb, and Previously will update the story as casting firms up. What is already clear is the shape of the bet: Paramount is not remaking a title, it is assembling an alliance as unlikely as the one in the film — a horror auteur, an action icon and the original gangster — to hunt the same audience the 2019 film found at Cannes. Follow the story in the Previously newsroom and across Browse.
