WARNING: this post contains spoilers for John Wick: Chapter 4
John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum had a thrilling enough ending that a fourth John Wick movie was not only inevitable, it was also needed. But the question of “why” John Wick: Chapter 4 needed to happen is something that star Keanu Reeves and director Chad Stahelski took seriously. If you’ve seen the film — and I hope you have, because spoilers are coming — you know the answer.
“We had the opportunity [to do another film] because the audience [response to] Chapter 3, and we were like, ‘What was the Why?’” Reeves said following Chapter 4‘s South by Southwest premiere. “And when Chad and I was talking, the ‘Why?’ was death — and it was John Wick’s death. For him to get his peace, or freedom, in a way… That was the reason to make the movie. It can’t just be, ‘Let’s do another one.’ It was really about death, or a way of dying.”
Stahelski added, “We kind of took the way of dying — or the way we live well to die well — as the theme.”
John Wick’s death was, perhaps unsurprisingly, Reeves’ favorite scene in the movie. “When he says, ‘Helen.’ That, for me, after like eight years of playing the role and after shooting the [massive fight on the other set of stairs], that part that was [a poignant link] to the past,” he said. John Wick: Chapter 4 also potentially sets up the John Wick-less future of John Wick, too.
But for now, make that money, Baba Yaga.
(Via the Hollywood Reporter)