Director Chad Stahelski already has ideas written down for five more John Wick sequels.
Speaking with Inverse, Stahelski was asked where the John Wick franchise was headed following the ending of John Wick: Chapter 4, which saw the titular character played by Keanu Reeves seemingly die after dueling an assassin named Caine (Donnie Yen).
“I have notebooks and notebooks of shit behind me, John Wicks 5, 6, 7, 8, 9,” Stahelski said. “We have ideas for days. We just don’t have the story locked. I have no interest in doing the cash grab of bringing John Wick back for something. Is he a character I like? Of course. And if I did a couple of John Wick movies, great. Keanu would do one again in a second if we had a good story. We leave that open-ended. I know that the studio would love us to say we have another one.”
Stahelski continued, “Keanu and I are always interested in that, but we leave it hanging out there a little bit to figure out if we have something that we’d want to watch. Second, we have a studio that’s very enthusiastic and not just financially motivated, but they’re just interested in seeing what we could do with it. So, they’ve been super cool of us this year about branching off. I know the term is ‘spin-offs’ or ‘ancillaries’ or whatever you want to call it. Keanu and I both went back, and we all said, ‘Look, we have ideas for the John Wick world, other characters that aren’t John Wick-centric. Would you guys be interested in exploring that?’ And they were super cool, and they said, ‘Yes, we’d be very interested in that.’ Characters that weren’t in any of the movies that had fallen to the sidelines because they just didn’t fit in our storylines, and some existing characters that we’d like to see other things.”
Does Keanu Reeves want to return for more John Wick movies?
In September 2023, franchise producer Basil Iwanyk told Collider that Reeves wanted to be “definitively” killed at the end of John Wick: Chapter 4 and that making these movies “destroys Keanu, physically and emotionally.”
“By the end, [Reeves is] always like, ‘I can’t do this again,’ and we agree with him,” Iwanyk said. “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.’ We were like, ‘You know, we’ll leave a 10% little opening.’”
The John Wick franchise is currently expanding with a spin-off prequel television series, The Continental, which airs on Peacock. Ana de Armas is also starring in another spin-off film, Ballerina, which currently has a June 7, 2024, release date.
