‘John Wick’ Boss Chad Stahelski Gets Candid About Franchise

John Wick creator Chad Stahelski is attempting one of the trickiest pivots in Hollywood: Turn a series of hit movies with a dead hero into a broader franchise. His four John Wick films starring Keanu Reeves as a stoic ronin gunslinger have been a rousing success for studio Lionsgate. But his last effort, 2023’s John Wick: Chapter 4, killed off its world-weary protagonist in a finale that felt perfectly fitting. After the film grossed nearly half a billion dollars, Lionsgate and Stahelski suddenly had a high-class problem: John Wick the franchise clearly has a lot more life left in it, while the John Wick character was seemingly six feet under. 

What to do? Lionsgate attempted (without Stahelski and Reeves) a Peacock spinoff TV limited series titled The Continental, which fell flat (Stahelski has thoughts about this). This week sees the release of the franchise’s first spinoff movie, Ballerina, which stars Ana de Armas as an assassin in the world of John Wick (Reeves shows up briefly). There is also a recently released documentary going behind the scenes of making the films (Wick is Pain), a forthcoming John Wick prequel anime movie, a spinoff in the works starring Donnie Yen’s fan-favorite blind assassin Caine and — possibly, perhaps certainly? — a John Wick: Chapter 5 (Stahelski has thoughts about all of this, as well). 

A former stuntman, Stahelski rose through the ranks as a second unit director on action films (such as Captain America: Civil War) before he and then-partner David Leitch were given a shot at helming 2014’s John Wick, which showcased their mesmerizing style of kinetic “gun fu” action. Below, Stahelski talks about all things Wick — and being a lone warrior fighting an endless line of studio suits.

Last year, Lionsgate announced that you now have “franchise oversight” over the world of John Wick. How much power does that actually entail?

I don’t know the answer. I promise you, James, I am pushing to find out. We seem to be doing something right, yet with every [movie], there is a bit of an argument. Now, I get it. Studios have to deal with a varying degree of talent and vision and some people fall short of doing what they say. Sometimes [studios are] told, “You don’t understand my vision” and it’s a cop out for “I have no idea what my vision is.” If I said to you, for John Wick 3: “I’m not going to do anything that’s worked before, I’m going to have a bunch of dogs that bite crotches, and I’m going to kill 186 people.” Are you going to give me $100 million for that?

Well, I’d say you have to work on that pitch. 

But if I give you the script, believe me, it reads worse than that pitch sounds. But in my head it makes sense. It used to come down to me being a big enough asshole but, sometimes, the asshole route doesn’t work. So now I’m a lot more patient. I go: “Listen, this idea could go south, it’s super weird, just give me two weeks with my stunt team and then watch a video.” Later they’re like, “Oh, that looks cool.” Then everybody takes credit for everything. But nobody thinks half our ideas are going to work.

Leitch says in the Wick is Pain documentary — a bit critically — that you “get a lot of juice by blowing things up and putting them back together again.” Do you think that’s still true? 

It’s 100 percent true. My process is fucked. It’s so not linear. I still get told how to write scripts. “You can’t do it that way.” Says who? The guys who suck? I had an argument today with somebody saying “That’s not how you put a set-piece together.” 

Who is telling you this?

Everyone who has done it a certain way for 20 years. Because blowing it up and ripping it apart fucks with people’s heads. I’m not trying to be an anarchist with logistics. But this is why there are fucking tropes. So many movies look the same because their process is the same. You have to ask “Why?” “Because they do X,Y, X.” Well, then fuck X, Y, Z. And we have done that in every department for five films now. It does frustrate people. 

The John Wick saga crossed the $1 billion mark after the release of Chapter 4. What does that milestone mean to you?

We tried to be an audience member and not chase the dollar. Keanu and I did it a love letter to ’70s action film and wuxia [Chinese martial arts] and Chambara [Japanese sword fighting] There are a lot of fans who like kung fu movies, Samurai films, Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson, Bullet, Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone. John Wick is a culmination of that. And because we’ve done okay financially with each one, it allowed us to increase the budget and keep doing more of the same — hopefully, in a better way, while expanding the mythology. 

Watching the documentary, I marveled at the studio notes on the first movie: They didn’t want you to kill the dog or for Wick to execute the villain played by Alfie Allen, and they wanted the bad guys to have poisoned Wick’s wife instead of her dying of natural causes. I always wonder when I hear stories like this: After the movie is a hit, does anybody say, “We were wrong about literally all those things”? 

That happened once. On John Wick 2, there was disagreement with someone very high up in the studio over John Wick doing euthanasia-assist to a character called Gianna (Claudia Gerini). It was, “Oh my God, we can’t have John Wick just kill her!” We’re not killing her. She had already slit her wrists and John Wick offers a way out that’s more honorable. They wanted two versions. We came out of the test screening and the audience was way more on board with what’s in the final film. The executive didn’t miss a beat, they just went, “You were right, I was wrong.” 

To their credit. 

It was pretty cool. But no one gets this: Even if you do a bake-off with two versions in test screenings, you would need the same audience to watch both versions to compare them, because audiences are different. But that never happens. I think you can learn a lot from test screenings, but I don’t think you can make choices based on them without showing the audience everything. 

You weren’t really involved with The Continental TV series. Were there any creative lessons to be learned from that in terms of how to expand this universe?

Keanu and I were — I wouldn’t say sidelined, but our opinion was heard and not really noted. [The studio] tried to convince me they knew what they were doing. A group of individuals thought they had the magic sauce. But if you take out Basil Iwanyk’s producing intuitiveness, if you take out Keanu’s way of delivering quirky dialogue and if you take out all the visuals I have in my head from Wong Kar-wai, anime, Leone, Bernardo Bertucci or Andrei Tchaikovsky … then it’s not the same thing. They thought this was as easy as using anamorphic lenses, do a kooky hotel, put in weird dialogue, and insert crime drama.  

If you saw our process, you’d be like, “You’re telling me this billion dollar franchise does it this way?” I’m scouting my next film in London and we saw a cool location yesterday which totally changed the second act. We rewrote the whole thing. I find great cast members and rewrite their parts constantly. That’s what makes [the movies] so good and organic — we’re constantly upgrading. But the studio likes to know what they’re getting for their buck and want to lock a script for budget reasons. While we’re saying, “Just write the check, we’ll see you at the finish line.” 

You had the premiere of Ballerina (which THR just gave a rave review) Tuesday night. How did that go?

It seemed to go pretty good. English audiences don’t laugh much. Everybody seemed to really enjoy it … We were very fortunate to find Ana de Armas and the enthusiasm and punch she has. There’s got to be a love if you’re coming into our franchise. Sometimes I’ll call the agencies and ask, “Who loves John Wick?” Norman Reedus bumped into Keanu one day and said, “Hey man, I love the Wicks” [and was cast in Ballerina]. Every cast member we’ve got has been a fan of the previous films. They come to work and it’s a different vibe because they understand the world. 

Do you ever lay awake at night and worry that the world of John Wick only works with John Wick? Because that’s a scary question, right? 

Keanu and I actually just talked about this. Look, it’s always tricky. I think the world can be supported as long as you don’t go crazy and carpet bomb. What we’re doing now are stories we really want to tell that feel organic. You’ve seen Alice in Wonderland. Now what about the Rabbit? What about the Cheshire Cat? Also, sometimes in your own franchise, you get so far up your own ass with the mythology that by the 10th movie you don’t know what’s going on. I don’t ever want to get that way with Wick. I want each one to be able to stand alone.

Was Keanu always supposed to appear in Ballerina?

That wasn’t in the original script. To be honest, I was kind of against it. But I do see the benefit and we wanted to help out [director Len Wiseman]. We had just opened John Wick 4 and it was huge. He couldn’t go back to the model of the first John Wick and do a little $18 million indie thing and try to build it up. In order to stay in the same game, you got to give him a fighting chance. And the easiest way to transfer that over — at least, from the studio point of view — was have Wick in Ballerina in a special timeline.

Does he appear in Caine? 

The Donny Yen spinoff doesn’t have the John Wick character. It’s got Donny Yen and it’s an ode to kung fu movies. If John Wick 1 was about Charles Bronson and Lee Marvin, this is about Chow Yun-fat, John Woo and Wong Kar-wai. So I think that one is a little easier to get it across to audiences because it’s in a sub-genre of what we love. 

The documentary shows the incredible amount of training Keanu undertakes, and his punishment seems to ramp up higher for each movie. He’s now 60. If you do another with him, there has to be a limit to how hard you can push this guy, right? Because at a certain point, things break. 

What do you do if you’re a world-class sprinter in your twenties and you don’t run so fast at 30? You start doing marathons — because marathon runners hit their prime in their mid-to-late thirties. You got to deal with the turns. For the first John Wick, Keanu had a really bad knee injury and he couldn’t punch and kick. So we came up with the Jiujitsu and gun-fu. We’re not going to lower the bar. We’re just going to move the bar to something we haven’t done before.

You’ve said that John Wick 5 won’t renege on the ending of 4, that John Wick will still have died. Has that evolved? The last time we spoke last year, you were trying to crack it.

I’m not going to lie to you, it’s a bit of a conundrum. Me and Mike Finch — the writer on 4 who’s also writing 5 — we’ve got a pretty good story that I think is cool. Once we have a 50-page book, and if we’re feeling it, we’ll sit with Keanu and shape this thing. Look, everybody seems to want it. It’s a matter of whether we crack it. We’re actively working on it. It’s just … is it going to be satisfying?

Is a prequel possible? Because the anime movie is a prequel, I assume this wouldn’t be. 

Keanu and I are not interested in going backwards. With the anime, you don’t have to de-age, you don’t have explain weird stuff, you don’t have to add a backstory. You accept anime in its own language without explanations. Anime just goes pop.  

I know you’ve heard this before. But John Wick 4 ended so well that there is a certain amount of … like there’s this feeling that nothing popular is allowed to end anymore. 

I’m with you, man. Keanu and I have discussed this many times and feel the same way. We finished 3 and thought that was going to be the last one. Look, we never expected to end John Wick. I just hate cheesy endings. I hate happy endings. Over a long enough timeline, everything’s a fucking tragedy. If you kill 86 people, you don’t get away. So when we got to 4, we wanted to have something that had a lot of fate and consequence. The ending was going to be a cliffhanger. Then we were sitting in Japan [during the filming of 4] going, “We didn’t stick the landing.” [Our original ending] kind of sucked. “Fuck, we got to finish this, right?” So I was really happy with the way 4 ended. It was Keanu and I saying, “Thank you, it’s been awesome, but it is time to go.” I didn’t want to overstay our welcome. 

If we go down the road of John Wick 5 and build this story and decide this isn’t right, there are probably going to be 10 other things we’ll discover that we’ll use for other things. It’s a great creative exercise. It’s being in the room riffing with people we love. That’s nothing but wins.

So it’s not a lock that John Wick 5 will exist? 

The studio would very much will it into existence, I’m sure, at some point. Look, they’ve been great and they’ve asked us to really try and we have a really good couple of ideas and we’re going to try. 

What are the biggest mistakes action movies seem to be making when you see other films? 

Please make sure you print this: This is only my opinion and my opinion is no better or worse than anybody else’s. Some things I think don’t work might work for some people. It’s the execution. Like with Die Hard. There’s not a lot of action, the whole thing takes place on three floors of a building, but John McClane is a great character. When he runs through the glass barefoot, I’m fucking in — that’s what you have to do. I could do the exact same choreography that’s in John Wick, but if you didn’t love Keanu Reeves as John Wick, we wouldn’t be talking right now. There are better athletes than Jackie Chan—

But we love Jackie Chan. 

You fucking love him! For the longest time, [the industry consensus] was, “It’s not about the action, it’s about the story.” That’s not true. And then there was, “It’s not about stories, it’s about the action.” That’s not true! You have to conceive the whole thing together. 

So biggest problem with action movies is people think they’re making two separate movies. The story doesn’t stop just because there’s punching and kicking. In some of the superhero stuff, when a second unit guy is doing half the movie, everything looks different during the action. Even the coloring and editing is different. [The film] never feels aligned. So if you don’t want to shoot your own action, then don’t do the movie. Whether it’s Steven Spielberg or Christopher Nolan or Guy Ritchie or the Wachowskis, they all shoot their own action. 

You mentioned how Wick with a different actor wouldn’t work. In the documentary, you first offer Jason Statham the Wick style for his movie Safe. Did Jason ever circle back and go, “I should have done that”?

So I want to straighten that up. We showed it to Jason and he thought it was cool as shit and wanted to do it. I’m the one who shut it down because it didn’t fit Jason’s character. With gun-fu, to do even a small sequence, he would have had to kill 20 people. Safe only has like four real bad guys; most of the guys are just guards showing up for work like the Red Shirts in Star Trek. We didn’t want Jason’s character to be a mass murderer. 

You talk about studio notes you didn’t do. Was there any note that you did that you regret?  

Yeah. On one particular John Wick, I had a shit fight over literally three minutes. Most studios, and even critics, have this weird thing about run times. Do you really give a fuck how long a movie is? The real question is: Are you bored? I have sat through a 90-minute movie that felt like four hours, and I had watched Lawrence of Arabia or Seven Samurai and it felt like two hours even though they’re four. No one bitched and moaned about Return of the King and Peter Jackson’s cut is four hours, so fuck off. 

They’ll say, “There’s metadata that says people get bored with anything over two hours and 20 minutes.” No one’s going to come out of a movie going, “That movie is fucking great, but it should have been a nice 2:36.” So when they said, “You’ve got to cut three minutes,” I looked at them like, “The audience gave it a 90 in a test score!”

They may be running the studio and great at financing, but I’ve made four movies that have grossed over a billion dollars. I’m like, “If the movie sucks, I’m willing to listen to anything. But if people love the movie, then who fucking cares?” 

I’m sure there are times where you’re like: “How many hit movies do I need to make — in a row, with each grossing more than the last — in order for you to trust me?”

We know it’s not four! I know that. I don’t have plans on sucking on the next one. But if I get past five, we can have this conversation again.