The first John Wick movie would easily have been a one-hit wonder, but with the presence of an actor like Keanu Reeves and a filmmaker like Chad Stahelski, the series has become one of the most revered action franchises of all time. Now having a gross of more than a billion dollars worldwide, its last movie was a cherry on top thanks to its usual adrenalin-packed action scenes and grueling narrative.
Yet, despite the immense success of the franchise, both the lead actor and director, aka Reeves and Stahelski, were unhappy with the ending of the third John Wick movie and that is the reason the fourth movie was made.
Reason Why John Wick 3 Ending Did Not Satisfy Keanu Reeves & Chad Stahelski
John Wick 3 is the second-highest-grossing movie of the entire franchise at $326,685,379 worldwide (via The Numbers). Even across numerous review websites, the movie holds an impressive rating such as an 89% aggregate on Rotten Tomatoes. Yet despite the audience and critical response and the movie being widely hailed as the second-best movie of the franchise, both Keanu Reeves and Chad Stahelski were unhappy with the movie’s ending.
While on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, the director revealed how they were absolutely done and finished with the franchise after the threequel. But the ending (where Wick falls down a hotel roof after being shot down multiple times and somewhat survives leading to the movie ending on a major cliffhanger) did not sit right with them.
“We did the third movie and then we were really done. We’re like, ‘We’re done.’ And then again, it was a year later, Keanu and I both felt like we kind of let everybody down with the ending of number 3.”
Even though the ending was well-liked, the entire franchise being somewhat based on mythology (see GameRant and SYFY) did not make it satisfying for them. To think that they had let the entire franchise go on just a cliffhanger made them feel that they didn’t leave everything they had on the table. And so the fourth movie was made.
How John Wick 3 Ending Inspired The End of John Wick 4
If going by the literal ending of the fourth chapter of the franchise, Keanu Reeves’ John Wick was dead. Yet, the ending remains ambiguous for the character has taken much worse than the wounds he seemingly succumbed to in the end.
While a fifth part is being planned (see Comic Book), confirming that Wick is indeed alive, it was the cliffhanger ‘cliche’ ending of the third movie that inspired the sort of a final ending of the fourth movie. While talking to Empire, Chad Stahelski stated,
“I said, ‘I’d be pissed if that’s how they ended the whole series. I’d be pissed at the director.’ And I had just read this treatise on samurai etiquette called Hagakure, the art of the way of dying. And we’re like, ‘Yeah, he’s got to die. And we got to come up with the coolest way to make that happen. We’ve got to make it all about, ‘you can only had a good death if you had a good life’.’ That’s the first line we wrote on a napkin in Japan, three years out. We wrote the movie backwards off that one thing.”
And so while two spinoffs— a movie Ballerina and a TV series The Continental— are in the works, we really recommend Reeves and Stahelski to take another Japanese tour (see THR), take some shots of Japanese whiskies, and have a few napkins handy!
The entire John Wick franchise can be streamed on Netflix now but it will only be available on Peacock following March 31.
