John Wick screenwriter Derek Kolstad’s name is seemingly everywhere right now, between his first Marvel project, the Disney+ series The Falcon and The Winter Soldier, and his other big spring release, the Bob Odenkirk-led action film Nobody. Meanwhile, there is a host of writing projects he’s currently working on, including three different videogame adaptations – a movie version of Just Cause, a Hitman TV show, and an animated Splinter Cell series for Netflix. Long story short: Kolstad has been busy.

And if you look at that list of projects, it’s not hard to find a common theme - they are all going to roundhouse kick you through a wall before exploding in your face. Kolstad is unapologetically an action writer, a man who will run his characters through a gauntlet of bullets, beatdowns and bad guys to mine every last drop of their humanity. And the best part is, he relishes his job.

“I grew up loving action movies,” Kolstad told Collider’s Steve Weintraub in a recent interview. “I write what I watch, I write what I love, and the best is when you go back to Sammo Hung and Jet Li ... I just love that kind of stuff. So I tend to over-write action a bit. And yet, when you hang out with a stunt team, and you get to geek out about what's on the page and what they do with it, it's rarely the same, but every now and then there's always one thing that was in the script that they're like, ‘That's fucking cool.’” Kolstad's action is so dynamic that stunt performers get excited just reading it.

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Image via Universal Pictures

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Kolstad is an heir apparent to the superstar action-movie scribes of yore, screenwriters whose names popped up again and again on the action classics of the ‘80s and ‘90s. We had folks like Steve E. de Souza (Commando, Die Hard, Die Hard 2, Street Fighter), Jeb Stuart (Die Hard, Lock Up, The Fugitive), Jeffrey Boam (Lethal Weapon 2 and 3, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade), and Lawrence Kasdan (Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Empire Strikes Back). And, of course, there was Shane Black, king of the celebrity action screenwriters, who created such genre classics as Lethal Weapon, The Long Kiss Goodnight, and The Last Boy Scout. Some of these writers are still around, of course, and have been able to adapt to a changing industry as straightforward action films have been pushed aside in favor of comic-book movies and giant interconnected franchises. (Black himself wrote and directed Iron Man 3.) But Kolstad in particular seems keen to refine ‘80s and ‘90s action sensibilities for modern times, and seeing his name pop up repeatedly in the credits for a large string of action projects reminds me of those writers who have called that genre home in the past.

It's fitting then that Kolstad started out writing junky direct-to-TV Dolph Lundgren action movies, the second of which, 2013’s The Package, was his first solo writing credit. It’s … not great, but, if you squint, you can see some of the nascent ideas Kolstad would use to better effect down the road. In that film, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin plays a low-level debt collector whom the villains underestimate as a nobody night-club bouncer until he starts tearing through their ranks. (Kolstad loves writing heroes who are initially dismissed before they start razing entire criminal organizations to the ground.) And at one point, Lundgren, playing a crime lord with rapidly failing health, earnestly declares that “peace is the only thing any of us want.”

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Image via Lionsgate

That certainly holds true for John Wick, Kolstad’s most popular creation. As played by Keanu Reeves, Wick is as fearless and indestructible as any of the action icons Kolstad grew up watching (which no doubt included the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone), but he’s also a quieter and more reserved type of character, someone who mechanically solves his problems with violence without ever feeling the need to punctuate them with a quip. Goodbye uber-masculinity, hello crying over your dead puppy. Also, Wick’s first outing notably involves a weary, aging mobster who wants nothing more than to squash their beef.

No one is going to mistake Reeves for Schwarzenegger, but Keanu was at least a known action-movie quantity, with all-time classics like Speed, Point Break, and The Matrix on his resume. The same can’t be said for Bob Odenkirk, who’s maybe the last person you’d expect to play an unkillable badass. Yet, in director Ilya Naishuller’s Nobody, Odenkirk allows Kolstad to further refine his modern-day action hero template, this time by borrowing a bit of the unassuming “every man” appeal Bruce Willis put to good use in the original Die Hard and melding it with the sad-sack existence of Breaking Bad’s pre-Heisenberg Walter White. Kolstad has become an expert at humanizing his characters before unleashing them on an unsuspecting hoard of mobsters, thugs and ne’er-do-wells.

And when he’s not laser-focused on his characters, Kolstad delights in building entire worlds to put them in. John Wick’s universe is a rich construct of assassin mythology – they have their own hotels and currency! – that can be mined for years to come. It’s no wonder the powers-that-be at Marvel thought Kolstad might be a good fit for The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’s writers’ room. (He wrote Episodes 3 and 4, and also serves as a co-executive producer on the Disney+ series.) You say Bucky Barnes is a broken character with a tragic backstory trying to atone for his past sins? Kolstad can do that. An expanding universe that operates on its own sets of rules and reveals a little more of itself with each new project? Kolstad can definitely do that.

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Image via Disney+

Of course, it’s not fair to attribute all the success of his recent projects to his scripts. There are directors and actors and stunt coordinators who obviously were just as important. But, personally, I found John Wick: Chapter 3 to be a significant step down from the previous two installments – it’s a messier affair that piles on endless action bits while losing some of the earlier films’ humanity – and I can’t help but wonder if it’s because it was the first Wick film where other writers were brought on to augment Kolstad’s vision. We’ll probably find out soon, as Kolstad told Collider he won’t be involved in scripting John Wick 4 or 5. Meanwhile, it’s not like he doesn’t have plenty to work on. That huge list of projects at the top of this article didn’t even include the Dungeons & Dragons TV show he’s developing, or the John Wick spinoff TV series The Continental that he also has a hand in. It’s certainly going to be a lot of bone-breaking fun to continue watching as Kolstad takes his unfettered love of classic shoot-‘em-ups and either applies it to original down-and-dirty action films like Nobody or blends it into all the franchise projects now being thrown his way.

KEEP READING: 'Falcon and the Winter Soldier' Writer Derek Kolstad on Marvel's Secret "Parliament" and Planting Seeds for Future MCU Projects