What next for John Wick? Director teases more movies, TV show

Clark Collis

Warning: This article contains major spoilers for John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum.

John Wick franchise director Chad Stahelski is not a man to count his box office chickens before they’ve hatched.

“I can’t tell you enough about how amazed we are by everything,” says the filmmaker, who made his directorial debut with 2014’s John Wick, the film which introduced Keanu Reeves‘ titular assassin. “We did the first one, and my co-director at the time Dave Leitch (Deadpool 2), we finished the movie, watched the first cut, and we were already looking for second unit jobs. We were like, Our directing careers are over! We’re done! They’re going to laugh at us! The second one, me and Keanu watched, and went, ‘We got a little weird on this one. We’re never going to work again.’ And it did well. This one, I’m already starting to look for janitorial jobs.”

Looks like Stahelski isn’t going to be picking up that broom any time soon — unless he’s using it to rehearse another action sequence. The just-released John Wick: Chapter 3 is expected to earn $35-40 million over its opening weekend, which would make it the most successful entry in the series so far. The movie also concludes in an extremely open-ended fashion with Ian McShane’s Continental Hotel-managing Winston betraying Keanu Reeves’ titular hitman. Wick then teams with Laurence Fishburne’s The Bowery King, who is planning to take on The High Table, laying the ground for further mayhem in a fourth movie, which Stahelski reveals he is keen to direct.

“I enjoy making these movies because there’s no limit,” he says. “We create our own mythology, and we have a studio (Lionsgate) that both stays out of our way and supports us on the wacky decisions. If people go see the movie, and it makes money, and they came back to us, Keanu and I have ideas for days. It’s a fun world. I could live here for the rest of my career. If people like it and want to watch more, I could think of way worse ways to spend your career. We’ll let the audience figure that out.”

Lionsgate is also planning to launch the John Wick universe on the small screen. In January 2018, it was announced that the studio and Starz are developing a spin-off TV show titled The Continental whose executive producers include both Stahelski and Reeves.

“They have a writers’ room working on it right now, trying to develop the first season,” says Stahelski. “Keanu and I have sat with that creative element, and laid out what we feel makes John Wick special, and what would make the TV show unique. Now, it will be a round of back and forths. But, yeah, Lionsgate is in actual full development of it and it’s called The Continental. It should be fun.”

Watch the trailer for John Wick: Chapter 3 above.

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