I reported a few days back that the Lionsgate chairman confirmed that John Wick 5, however unlikely it seemed, was in development, but it also seems that – as we already knew – the World of John Wick is still being mined for all it’s worth and, honestly, at this stage, I’m here for it all!
Filmaker Chad Stahelski, first off, admits that he wasn’t terribly involved in the recent The Continental miniseries (which I loved) – “very, very, very little to do with it other than helping that creative team look inside our little world, and we gave them a little tour of how we do things, and then they took it and made it their own so that was a separate creative team” – but he plans on being more creatively involved in the future of John Wick’s world and the first place he’s aiming to start is with the much-talked-about but rarely seen in the movies or The Continental, High Table.
He says that, at the minute, they’re looking at a TV series based on the shadowy organisation that runs and control the world of assassins that we see in the Wick movies: “We’re never going to show the whole High Table; we’ll show the representatives, but we’ll always keep some of that [mystery].”
Smart move.
Going on, he hinted that some of the characters we’ve met in the John Wick movies, in particular John Wick Chapter 4, are definitely up for more stories: “Yeah, I love Donnie [Yen], I love Rina [Sawayama], love the Tracker (Shamier Anderson), and the TV show and the ancillaries will give us a chance to expand the kind of fun world we’ve created, and it doesn’t have to be John Wick, the character specific, you know what I mean so that we can explore all that stuff.
“And I think TV is a better format for that, I think because people can jump into the backgrounds, you don’t have to spend so much time with the first act set up and all that,” he continued.
Yen’s Caine and Sawayama’s Akira are two characters who, quite unsubtly, are set up for more outings in the forth movie and they’re both more than interesting enough to carry their own movie, same with Anderson’s Tracker… the beauty of the characters in Wick’s world is that they are all hyper-realistic and verging on superheroes or Mortal Kombat characters, so in the right hands, anything is possible.
“I think, for TV especially,” he goes on, “world-building and action, those two have stayed pretty separate. But to try and combine them and give fans [both]? Look, I love the [TV] slow-burn too, but after six episodes, I would like something to happen in my TV shows, you know? So, to try and bring that to TV, what we do with features would be really exciting.”
John Wick spinoff The Ballerina will be ‘unlike anything we’ve seen in previous movies.’
So, John has a comic series behind him, an open-world game ahead and he has already had movies and a TV series that have touched his world… does that leave anything? Well, yes, it does… how about animation or, more precisely, anime?
Stahelski says that an anime movie – or perhaps series – is in development: “We’re doing that and a Japanese anime because I love Japanese anime so much. So to create all the cool stories that anime could achieve better than we could and the TV show to expand our world, we’ll still get our fix, you know what I mean? And we’ll still have all the fun.”
With Wick’s hyper-real, fantasy tropes, an anime story would fit perfectly and be it a movie or a series, it would, as Stahelski says, allow them to stretch the action and story further than then can at the minute in live-action.
So, a High Table series, and anime and potential spinoffs are joining The Continental and Ballerina in expanding the World of John Wick and personally, I could not be more excited and, as someone whose headcanon for Wick also includes Atomic Blonde, Nobody, Hotel Artemis and Sizu, this is fertile land that I can’t wait to see further explored, no matter the medium!
Thoughts? I know you have them! Voice-off in the usual ways on FTN’s Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, Bluesky,
Truth, Tumblr, Threads & Mastodon!
Lionsgate chairman says John Wick 5 is coming along with much more
Source: The Playlist
Marc
Marc is a self-confessed nerd. Ever since seeing Star Wars for the first time around 1979 he’s been an unapologetic fan of the Wars and still believes, with Clone Wars and now Underworld, we are yet to see the best Star Wars. He’s a dad of two who now doesn’t have the time (or money) to collect the amount of toys, comics, movies and books he once did, much to the relief of his long-suffering wife. In the real world he’s a graphic designer. He started Following the Nerd because he was tired of searching a million sites every day for all the best news that he loves and decided to create one place where you can go to get the whole lot. Secretly he longs to be sitting in the cockpit of his YT-1300 Corellian Transport ship with his co-pilot Chewie, roaming the universe, waiting for his next big adventure, but feels just at home watching cartoons with his kids….
Nerd Comments