When Red Sparrow premiered in 2018, audiences were introduced to the icy, seductive world of Dominika Egorova, a former Russian ballerina turned state-trained seductress and operative. Played with chilling grace by Jennifer Lawrence, Dominika’s journey through espionage, betrayal, and personal sacrifice marked one of the most cerebral and morally ambiguous spy thrillers in recent memory.
Now, nearly a decade later, the world of Red Sparrow is set to return with a speculative sequel: Red Sparrow: The Phoenix Protocol — a gritty, cold-war-era thriller reborn for a new geopolitical age.
The original film concluded with Dominika masterfully outwitting her superiors in the Russian intelligence hierarchy, orchestrating the downfall of her abusive handler, and quietly consolidating power as a rising force within the Kremlin’s shadowy world. But The Phoenix Protocol picks up five years later, with the political landscape—and Dominika herself—drastically changed.
Now stationed as an elite intelligence liaison in Brussels, Dominika finds herself walking a dangerous tightrope between protecting Russia’s secrets and feeding key intelligence to the CIA, specifically to Nate Nash (Joel Edgerton), her former lover and handler. Their connection, long severed, is reignited when Dominika discovers that a rogue faction within the SVR has initiated “The Phoenix Protocol”—a plan to resurrect the Sparrow Program globally by targeting vulnerable operatives across Europe and reprogramming them as deep-cover agents.
As assassinations, memory erasures, and psychological warfare ripple across the intelligence community, Dominika must decide where her true loyalty lies—and how much of her soul she’s willing to sacrifice to end the program she once barely survived.
Directed by Denis Villeneuve, the imagined sequel embraces a moodier, more cerebral tone than the first film, with a focus on psychological warfare over brute force. Flashbacks, hallucinations, and identity shifts blur the line between memory and manipulation. The aesthetic is slick, icy, and austere—mirroring the emotional armor Dominika has built around herself.
Jennifer Lawrence returns with a colder, more lethal edge—less victim, more viper. Edgerton's Nate, haunted by regrets, provides the human counterbalance to Dominika’s control. Their chemistry remains electric, but now it’s laced with mistrust and years of silence.
At its core, The Phoenix Protocol would explore the cost of control—over others and oneself. Can someone like Dominika ever be free, or is she forever a weapon forged by state and circumstance?
