Even if John Wick: Chapter 4 seemed to give the titular character some semblance of a bookend, money speaks and it looks like a fifth installment could be coming.
Warning: Spoilers for John Wick: Chapter 4 ahead
At the end of Chapter 4, Wick (Keanu Reeves) dies after a shootout with Marquis (Bill Skarsgård). He watches the sunset in Paris before seemingly bleeding out. We then see Winston (Ian McShane) and the Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne) visit his grave. That would suggest the character is dead, but as Fast X just showed, if there's still mileage to go, no one is above coming back.
Speaking during Lionsgate's Q4 2023 earnings call, Joe Drake confirmed that a fifth John Wick movie is in development.
“We're now moving across that franchise, not just in the AAA video game space, but looking at what the regular cadence of spinoffs [is and] television really growing that universe so that there is a steady cadence of a franchise that there's [a] clear appetite by the audience,” he said.
He continued, “What is official is that, as you know, Ballerina is the first spinoff that comes out next year. We're in development on three others [films], including [John Wick 5] and including [a] television series, The Continental, [which] will be airing soon. And so, we're building out the world and when that fifth movie comes, [it] will be organically grown out of how we're starting to tell those stories. But you can rely on a regular cadence of John Wick.”
Now, it's important to remember that while audiences clearly have an appetite for John Wick — Chapter 4's strong box office run pushed the franchise's total gross past $1 billion — you don't want to jump the gun and push too much content in front of audiences. The Star Wars series ran into that issue, and it's important to remember that each installment of the John Wick franchise had a couple of years to breathe in between each one. There was a two-and-a-half-year gap between the first and second film and then about 26 months before Parabellum came out. Granted, the time between Parabellum and Chapter 4 was nearly four years, but the pandemic played a huge part in that.
Drake did mention that Ballerina — which is the first spinoff feature film in the John Wick series — comes out soon. The spinoff film stars Ana de Armas and Reeves will be featured in the film as Wick. It will be interesting to see how many other stories the franchise can get out of this universe. While built out, audiences come to see Keanu Reeves do Keanu Reeves things. Here's hoping Lionsgate makes the right choice with expanding this IP.
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