Will there be a John Wick 5? Director Chad Stahelski isn’t so sure. In a new interview, Stahelski reiterates the same zen-like point of view since directing the first John Wick in 2014: That he’ll make the fifth film if/when the inspiration strikes him and gets Keanu Reeves excited, as well.
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Stahelski told Empire Magazine that when it comes to John Wick 5, “I honestly don’t know. Lionsgate is keen on doing more John Wick stuff, understandably. It’s not a bad thing for a director to have a property that they want to make more of. I don’t have a take right now. But I could wake up tomorrow and have a cool idea that I’d pitch to Keanu, or he would pitch to me, and it might hit that chord of, ‘Oh my God, we got to do this right now.’”
“Now we’ve done the four, and completed the circle, so to speak, I think it’s pretty good closure for the series,” the director continued. “And then there’s the competitor, or the real director in me who goes, ‘F*ck it, let’s just see if we can do it.’ It’s very appealing. I just don’t have the ‘why’ yet. But that doesn’t mean we should stop looking.”
While it sounds like Stahelski is still in the conceptual stage of another John Wick movie, that’s not to say there isn’t the core of a new film taking shape:
“I have scenes, I have action sequences in my head that we haven’t used that I’d love to do,” Stahelski teased. “If we do come back, we can’t just do the same thing. I gotta do my homework. I gotta get better.”
After four John Wick films over nearly a decade, Stahelski has become famous for his soul-searching breaks in between installments, where he imagines the next batch of death-defying stunts that he, Keanu, and their crew of top-notch stunt performers will pull off.
This year, John Wick officially becomes a franchise universe. John Wick: Chapter 4 earned a franchise-high $432+ million at the worldwide box office, and even sparked talk of needing a new stunt category at the Oscars. A TV limited series prequel/spinoff, The Continental, will air on Peacock in September and examine the past of Ian McShane’s hotel manager, Winston. A spinoff film called Ballerina will take the titular female assassin seen in John Wick 3, and follow her story of revenge (with Ana de Armas playing the Ballerina).
Of course, there is one major hurdle in the future of the John Wick series, it’s that John Wick died at the end of Chapter 4. So while the franchise can certainly expand, can it do so without the man himself?
As Stahelski teases, “dead” might be a stretch for a guy like John Wick: “You know, we’ve seen John take worse injuries.”
The John Wick films can be streamed on Peacock.
