Once upon a pre-pandemic world, the fourth and fifth instalments of the John Wick franchise were planned to film back to back. As things changed, John Wick 4 has now been and gone, but the fate of another sequel is something that is very much undecided. Although the box office performance of John Wick 4 certainly has the studio wanting more, director Chad Stahelski isn’t so sure that Keanu Reeves should return again as the ultra-violent assassin.
In an interview with The Direct, Stahelski opened up about why doing John Wick 5 could end up being a case of pushing the franchise so far. For a four-film franchise, that is about to be expanded anyway with a spin-off movie and prequel TV event, the director suggests that John Wick may have run his course and any further movies would only repeat the same story again. He said:
“The real question you ask yourself is not, ‘Do I want it?’ Yes, I wouldn’t mind doing it. We just tried to knock it out of the park. We tried to put everything on the table, take nothing, and leave it all. Like, ‘F—k it, every idea. We’re not saving anything. We’re not trying to build. Just everything you got, leave it there.’ We feel we put everything we had into John Wick 4, and we feel we completed the cycle. We feel like we ended it. So, we feel like, ‘You know, that was a great way to wrap up the previous three films and the fourth and deliver something satisfying and fun.’ Right now, if you put a gun in my head, you might as well shoot me. It’s very easy to be repetitive. The trick is how you be repetitive with individuality. How do you put your authorship or your agency into something that’s obviously been done three times before?”
John Wick 4 is the Highest Grossing Movie of the Keanu Reeves Franchise.
The John Wick franchise started life as just another action movie that was destined join the many other action movies that have brought exuberant violence to the big screen for those who love nothing better than watching guns, explosions and fist-fights. However, by the time John Wick 3 arrived, it was clear that the ensemble cast had created something special and that obviously meant more movies to come.
It seems though that John Wick 4, with its extended runtime and very final ending for the titular assassin, brought everything to a climax that would be hard for another movie to beat. In terms of box office, the film is currently one of the highest grossing movies of the year and the biggest of the John Wick franchise. It would be hard for Stahelski to be criticized for wanting the franchise to go out on a high and not descend into the pit of self-congratulation that many sub-par action movie sequels have found themselves in.
For the immediate future, the John Wick franchise will be continuing on with the Ana de Armas-led spin-off Ballerinaand Peacock two-parter The Continental, both of which will be arriving within the next year. By then, we may know for certain what the future holds for the John Wick franchise.
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
