John Wick: Chapter 4's Alternate Ending Was Rejected by Test Audiences
John Wick: Chapter 4 ended with the big twist of apparently killing off its titular character. John sacrificed himself in a duel to free his old friend Caine (Donnie Yen) and his daughter from the threat of the High Table and died on the steps of the site where the gunslinging went down. The final shot of John Wick sitting like a Buddhist monk as his life slipped away left a lot of fans wondering if we really saw what we saw.
Apparently, John Wick: Chapter 4 had an alternate ending – one that director Chad Stahelski has been upfront about in the past, telling Collider he compromised with Lionsgate on having options for John Wick's fate. "[I said] 'I'll tell you what, I'll shoot the ending two ways, you know, with one extra little thing, two extra little shots. I'll let you know he's alive, and I'm gonna leave it up to the audience to decide, and we're gonna test both.' And they were super cool. They let me go through the whole movie ... The test audience has definitely had a favorite of that, which is the ending that you guys saw, and it was nice to show and get actual feedback ... And everyone was very understanding of that, and it was good to come to that conclusion together without having to fight it or force it."
As we're now learning, the test audiences decided that one of those endings was absolutely NOT what they wanted to see:
"[The theatrical ending] was the ending Keanu and I wanted, but we shot a different ending," Stahelski told Empire. "We shot an ending where you actually saw John Wick at the end of the movie. So it was very clear that he was still alive. The audiences we tested with absolutely preferred the ambiguous ending."
It would've arguably been a cheap trick for John Wick: Chapter 4 to make us think that John Wick made the ultimate sacrifice, only to undo that change a second later. The ending we got in theaters was indeed much more aligned with the kind of samurai-style stories that have made Kurosawa films and so many others so famous. There's even a symbolic subtext to the death scene that Stahelski is already teasing as a possible perfect in-road to John Wick: Chapter 5: the death of the infamous "John Wick" not being the literal death of "John" the man. There was a whole 'old live vs. new life' subtext to Chapter 4, that could become very literal:
"You know, we've seen John take worse injuries," Stahelski admitted.
John Wick: Chapter 4 will be streaming on STARZ streaming app starting on September 26th.