This post, as the title above strongly suggests, will talk about the ending of the excellent John Wick: Chapter 4. If you don’t want to be spoiled, move on to the next post!
Okay, we good? If you’ve seen the movie (or don’t mind getting spoiled), the end of the film sees Keanu Reeves’ titular character collapse on the steps with a pretty serious wound. We then cut to a cemetery where the former manager of the New York City Continental Winston (Ian McShane) and the Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne) stand aside a tombstone with the words, “John Wick: Loving Husband” engraved on it. This is the world of John Wick, however, a universe where Wick in a previous movie survived getting shot multiple times and falling off a building. And since we never see Wick’s body, the door is open to the idea that he may, in fact, still be alive.
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Camp Damascus
It turns out that Chapter 4 had another ending tested out before going with what we saw in theaters.
“[The theatrical ending] was the ending Keanu and I wanted, but we shot a different ending,” director Chad Stahelski told Empire in a recent interview. “We shot an ending where you actually saw John Wick at the end of the movie. So it was very clear that he was still alive. The audiences we tested with absolutely preferred the ambiguous ending.”
Chapter 4 came about because the director and Reeves weren’t happy with the end of John Wick: Chapter 3–Parabellum.
“I’d be pissed if that’s how they ended the whole series. I’d be pissed at the director,” said Stahelski about Chapter 3. “And I had just read this treatise on samurai etiquette called Hagakure, the art of the way of dying. And we’re like, ‘Yeah, he’s got to die. And we got to come up with the coolest way to make that happen. We’ve got to make it all about, ‘You can only have a good death if you had a good life’.’ That’s the first line we wrote on a napkin in Japan, three years out. We wrote the movie backwards off that one thing.”
And ambiguity or not, there’s still room for a potential fifth film, something that Stahelski hasn’t ruled out. Even if Wick did officially die, who’s to say that he can’t fight his way out of Hell, an idea that has bandied around the internet after Chapter 4’s release? That’d be one way to top the impressive set pieces we saw in the last film, if nothing else.
