SAN FRANCISCO, July 4 — What if John Wick took orders from a talking banana?

As the story goes, retired hitman John Wick went on his vigilante spree because gangsters killed his dog during a burglary.

What if he was motivated less by a lost loved one, and more by the utterances of a sentient fruit?

Though My Friend Pedro has its roots in an Adobe Flash game released several months before 2014’s Keanu Reeves action movie, the game invites easy comparison not only to John Wick but also the sarcastic R-rated sensibilities of 2016 superhero movie Deadpool.

In fact, while Deadpool star and producer Ryan Reynolds is heading up December’s man-stuck-in-a-video-game movie Free Guy, My Friend Pedro is going the other way courtesy of John Wick’s creator, Derek Kolstad.

It’ll be a half-hour comedy drama that likewise adheres to R-rated standards.

Previously, a launch trailer treatment for My Friend Pedro took on an animated style.

Since June 2019, the game has been released on Nintendo Switch and Windows PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4.

The Switch and PC editions together accumulated a top critic score average of 80 per cent and an overall designation of "Strong” from contributors to review aggregation service OpenCritic.

The Keanu connection extends beyond John Wick, too, as My Friend Pedro was based on a 2014 flash game that riffed on video game franchise Max Payne.

The first Max Payne game incorporated a slow-motion bullet-time element made famous by Reeves’ 1999 blockbuster The Matrix.

Kolstad, who wrote John Wick movies one, two and three, has already attached himself as producer to adaptations of chaotic action game franchise Just Cause and assassination series Hitman.

He’s not the only John Wick alumnus on board either, with David Leitch — co-director of the first film — getting his production company involved too.

And it’s another score for dj2 Entertainment, whose co-founder Dimitri M. Johnson was one of the producers on 2020’s Sonic the Hedgehog film.

The company has also been involved in adaptation deals with the studios behind time-travelling teen drama Life is Strange and post-influenza pandemic Vampyr (French studio Dontnod for both), spooky, miniaturized journey Little Nightmares (Sweden’s Tarsier Studios) and dystopian survival We Happy Few (Canada’s Compulsion Games) among others. — AFP-Relaxnews