Contains spoilers for for John Wick: Chapter 4.
Nothing can stop John Wick. We know that now. But after four movies of increasingly elaborate means of doing his enemies in – gun-fu, horse-fu, book-fu, etc – the time came for Baba Yaga to lay down his arms (and books, and horses, etc) for good at the end of the fourth John Wick instalment. As you might recall from the latest film, there was that showdown at the Sacre-Couer in Paris between Wick and the Marquis (Bill Skarsgård), which left Wick fairly definitively ascending to the great High Table in the sky. He’s got a grave and everything. He’s gone. Isn’t he?
In an interview with Collider, series producer Basil Iwanyk says that the franchise’s star Keanu Reeves was keen for that death to be definitive – a proper full stop ending to the film (and Wick), rather than a kind of dot-dot-dot. “After the second, third, and fourth movie, making these films is so exhausting and it destroys Keanu, physically and emotionally,” Iwanyk says. “By the end, he’s always like, ‘I can’t do this again,’ and we agree with him. The guy is just a shell of himself because he just goes off and goes for it. He was like, ‘I wanna be definitively killed at the end of this movie.’” But, as ready as Reeves was to say goodbye to the character for good, Iwanyk and the other producers wanted to leave themselves some wriggle room to bring the character back – and given that we only see Wick slump to the floor from afar in the film, there is a chance he didn’t actually kick the bucket. “We were like, ‘You know, we’ll leave a 10% little opening’,” says Iwanyk.
It certainly sounds like Reeves is now inclined to make use of that 10% – and whenever Reeves and Wick director Chad Stahelski are ready to go with another chapter, Iwanyk says he’ll be there. “The way I describe it is that they’re like Paul McCartney and John Lennon, and I’m Ringo,” Iwanyk said. “They’ll call me and let me know, ‘All right, we’re showing up. Here’s where you show up, and here’s what our story is.'” Iwanyk is fairly certain that will happen eventually. “We all want another John Wick. We don’t know what it looks like and when it will happen, but we love each other and we love this world.”