As you may have noticed, the first John Wick had a lot of kills — about 80, to be semi-exact. (And we’re just talking about the first one.) But it wasn’t always that way. In a new interview with ComicBook.com, one of the initial entry’s directors, Chad Stahelski, says that when he first read the screenplay for the film that incidentally wasn’t always called John Wick, the number of deaths was way low. Way, way, way low.
“It was much more contained. I think only three people died in the original script, two were in a car crash. It was very, very minimal, and it was slightly different,” Stahelski told the publication. That obviously changed. “I’d always had this idea about Greek mythology and how to tell more a fablestic kind of story, make a surreal action movie so it wasn’t so grounded and gray, just something different.”
Can you imagine a John Wick in which he doesn’t shoot roughly 20 people in the head in the span of a minute? Or one where the tragic murder of his unimaginably cute puppy doesn’t lead him into a murderous rage? Luckily Stahelski and uncredited co-director David Leitch made sure you never have to see that John Wick. The kills were even upped in the sequels. ComicBook.com estimates that John Wick 2 boasts 128 deaths while the threequel slims that down to a comparatively more modest 94. Perhaps in some alternate universe people are watching a much more artful and humane version of the bloodbath we all know and love.
(Via ComicBook.com)