James Wan is back in the director’s chair. For the first time since Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom in 2023, Wan has signed on to direct a new feature film, and it is not a horror movie. He is taking on The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil remake at Paramount, an English-language version of the acclaimed 2019 South Korean crime thriller that has been sitting in development since 2022.
The man who launched Saw, Insidious, and The Conjuring universe is stepping behind the camera again, and the project he chose is a serial killer story with crime-action bones. That creative choice is what makes this announcement worth actually talking about.
The original film premiered at Cannes Midnight Screenings and follows a mob boss and a detective who reluctantly join forces to hunt a serial killer terrorizing their city. It grossed $24.8 million in South Korea on its own, hit number one on opening weekend, and is loosely based on a real case.
Don Lee (Ma Dong-seok), who played the gangster in the original and has since built a massive international following through Train to Busan and his MCU run in The Eternals, is returning for the remake. His involvement is a genuine draw; this is not a case of the studio swapping out the original cast for Hollywood names. No casting has been confirmed yet for the cop or the devil roles, so more announcements are coming.
Why This Matters for Horror Fans
Wan’s last directorial credit did not go as hoped. Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom underperformed at the box office, and the broader DC era was already running out of steam by the time it landed. So the fact that Wan is stepping back into directing at all is worth paying attention to. But the bigger question for genre fans is why James Wan’s The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil, and not a horror film.
To get that, you have to look at what Wan has been building while everyone waited. His Blumhouse-Atomic Monster banner is one of the most active production companies in Hollywood right now. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy opens April 17, 2026. Backrooms, the A24 horror film from 19-year-old director Kane Parsons that Wan produced, hits theaters May 29. Insidious: The Bleeding World is locked in for August 21. A new Paranormal Activity is in development. Wan is producing all of it. He is just not the one directing any of it.
That is the pattern worth noticing. There’s a solid case that Wan has deliberately stepped back from directing horror, not out of disinterest, but because he’s operating at a different level now. He pulled the same move when he did Furious 7 and Aquaman to avoid being permanently pigeonholed as the Conjuring guy.
Now, instead of directing horror himself, he’s handed those reins to filmmakers like Lee Cronin and Kane Parsons while he shapes and produces the entire slate. Horror auteur becoming horror mogul. The directorial comeback, being a serial killer thriller, fits that shift perfectly; it keeps him in the genre-adjacent space while announcing that he’s not just the haunted house director anymore.
The Team Behind James Wan’s The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil
The creative package Paramount put together tells you exactly what kind of movie this is supposed to be.
Shay Hatten is writing the screenplay from a draft by Oscar-winner Brian Helgeland (L.A. Confidential, Mystic River). Hatten’s credits include John Wick: Chapters 3 and 4 and Rebel Moon; he also has Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil on his slate, which puts him at an interesting intersection of action and horror.
That combination of Hatten’s propulsive action instincts and Helgeland’s prestige-crime foundation signals a film that wants to hit like John Wick and land with genuine dramatic weight. Most outlets covering this story buried Hatten’s involvement or skipped it entirely. They shouldn’t have; the writer matters here.
Then there is Sylvester Stallone producing through Balboa Productions alongside Atomic Monster. That one detail signals commercial scale. This is not a genre experiment with a limited budget; it is a full studio action-thriller with real production muscle behind it.
Wan also slots into Paramount’s growing roster of filmmaker deals following the Skydance acquisition, joining the Duffer Brothers, James Mangold, Jon M. Chu, and Dan Trachtenberg. For genre fans, having Wan as the studio’s representative in that infrastructure means Paramount is serious about backing genre-adjacent projects at scale. He is already producing the next Paranormal Activity for them, so the relationship goes deeper than this one film.
Whether his next directorial project brings him back to outright horror is genuinely unclear. What is clear is that this choice says a lot about where he sees his next chapter as a filmmaker.