Forget John Wick, Netflix's Assassin Thriller Franchise Already Has 2 Perfect Movies

Published Sep 28, 2026, 10:34 PM EDT

Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies, television, culture, and politics online and in print since 2017. He worked as a Senior Editor in Adbusters Media Foundation from 2018-2019 and wrote for WhatCulture in early 2020. He has been a Senior Features Writer for ScreenRant since 2020.

While the John Wick franchise is a lot of fun, Netflix’s two-movie action thriller series is already its equal. The John Wick franchise has a lot to answer for. When the first movie in the series arrived back in 2014, the Keanu Reeves vehicle was a breath of fresh air. A decade of shakycam action movies inspired by the Bourne trilogy had left viewers yearning for the slick slow-mo of John Woo’s classic ‘90s action thrillers, and John Wick delivered this in spades.

As the John Wick franchise continued and expanded with sequels, a spinoff series, and a movie spinoff, its style of gun-fu went on to reshape Hollywood action movies. Bullet Train, Atomic Blonde, the Nobody movies, Kate, Gunpowder Milkshake, the Daniel Radcliffe action comedy Guns Akimbo, Love Hurts, Pretty Lethal, Violent Night, Monkey Man, and Sisu all borrowed from the John Wick franchise’s house style until it became almost as ubiquitous as shakycam once was.

Since the style of the series is so popular, one could be forgiven for assuming the John Wick franchise is the only assassin thriller franchise from the 2020s that is worth seeking out. However, Netflix’s 2023 South Korean thriller Kill Boksoon and its 2025 spinoff Mantis prove that couldn't be further from the truth. Kill Boksoon follows Jeon Do-yeon’s contract killer Gil Boksoon as she balances her successful career as an assassin with her tricky relationship with her 15-year-old daughter.

Kill Boksoon And Mantis Make Netflix’s Kill Boksoon Universe An Action Classic

Much like Catherine Zeta-Jones’s title character in Kill Jackie, Boksoon must battle an onslaught of fellow assassins when she refuses to complete her final job for her employer. Already disturbed by her daughter’s violent clashes at school, Boksoon tries to leave her criminal career behind, but her employers demand that she pull off one last mission by killing the teenage child of a politician.

Turning down this demand puts a proverbial target on her back, but Boksoon soon proves that she has earned her reputation as the agency’s deadliest assassin as she cuts a bloody swathe through her former coworkers. Thus, the stage is set for a satisfying string of bloody showdowns between Boksoon and other killers, turning Kill Boksoon into an intense thriller that doubles as an unexpectedly tender mother/ daughter story.

Much like the John Wick movies expanded their mythology with each new outing, 2025’s Kill Boksoon spinoff Mantis asked viewers to consider what happened to the surviving employees of Boksoon’s assassin agency after the original movie’s brutal ending. In this spinoff, Yim Se-wan’s titular hitman Mantis returns from some time off to find that his agency, MK, is in tatters. After setting up his own business as an assassin, Mantis soon finds himself in a bloody turf battle with other prominent local contract killers.

Kill Boksoon Must Continue After Mantis and Kill Boksoon

While Kill Boksoon blended believable character drama with its intense action thrills, Mantis is a more straightforward thriller that takes on a more heightened, colorful tone. Like the John Wick sequels, Mantis abandons any attachment to realism in favor of pure stylized violence, but this does mean the spinoff feels less rooted in believable characters than Kill Bookson.

That said, Mantis still builds a compelling expanded world around the characters introduced in Kill Bookson, so the series shouldn’t end with these two outings alone. If Netflix can make four seasons of the critically abhorred true-crime series Monster, then it is reasonable to argue that the streaming service can afford to expand its best hitman thriller series with a new movie. After all, Kill Boksoon and Mantis have already proven the franchise can compete with the balletic brutality of the John Wick series.