John Wick star Keanu Reeves is playing things cautiously when it comes to John Wick: Chapter 5, with the actor saying that they are waiting to see how well audiences respond to the upcoming fourth outing. Speaking with Total Film, Reeves continues to be his usual humble self and is careful not to simply expect John Wick: Chapter 5 to be a foregone conclusion. Despite the franchise’s overwhelming popularity.
The original plan was to shoot John Wick 4 and John Wick 5 back-to-back, but those plans were changed in order to concentrate solely on the fourth chapter. Director Chad Stahelski feels similarly to Reeves about a fifth chapter, and says that he may need a little break before throwing himself back into the action-packed world of Wick.
“You have to see how the audience responds to what we did. The only reason we’ve had a chance to make these movies is that people have liked what we have done. So I think we have to wait and see how the audience responds to it. Hopefully they’ll like it.”
Starring Keanu Reeves, Bill Skarsgård, Donnie Yen, Laurence Fishburne, Ian McShane, Hiroyuki Sanada, Lance Reddick, Scott Adkins, Clancy Brown, Shamier Anderson, George Georgiou, and Rina Sawayama, John Wick: Chapter 4 finds the unstoppable hitman facing off against a new enemy with powerful alliances across the globe, forcing old friends into foes.
“You might have to give me and John Wick just a little break. Ask me in a couple of months. In the next week, I’m praying to the movie gods that I finish this one.”
John Wick: Chapter 4 is scheduled to be released by Lionsgate on March 24, 2023.
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The John Wick Franchise Could Soon Have its Own Shared Universe
Lionsgate
While Keanu Reeves, Chad Stahelski, and audiences wait and see whether John Wick: Chapter 4 will spawn a fifth outing, we already know that we will return to this violent world of assassins in future. A spinoff, Ballerina, is now in development, with writer Shay Hatten belieiving that the project could lead to a John Wick shared universe.
“I think this movie is just opening up more and more avenues of this world. There’s all these little pockets of different crime families, and different corners of the world that John might never have a reason to go visit in his mainline story quest,” Hatten explained. “But ‘Ballerina,’ through the lens of the ballet theatre that we see John visit in the third movie, explores a character who’s come up through that, and then gets sent on a journey to a new pocket of the Wick world that I think is a concept that we haven’t seen in any of the four previous movies. I think it really just shows this limitless potential for expanding and exploring the grey areas of this world.”
Directed by Len Wiseman, Ballerina will take place between the events of John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum and the upcoming John Wick: Chapter 4. Led by No Time to Die star Ana de Armas as a ballerina-assassin named Rooney, the spinoff project will once again follow a master assassin seeking revenge as the titular ballerina attempts to hunt down the assassins who killed her family.
Ballerina will star Ian McShane, Lance Reddick, Anjelica Huston, Gabriel Byrne, Norman Reedus, Catalina Sandino Moreno, and Keanu Reeves as John Wick.
