John Wick 4 Is Setting A Franchise Record
John Wick: Chapter 4 is on its way and the latest of installment of the Keanu Reeves revenge series is breaking a record.
The first John Wick film was the kind of career revival no one could have expected, not even star Keanu Reeves. It went from a mobster revenge film starring Reeves at a low point in his career to a cult film beloved by action aficionados to a constantly expanding, popular franchise. With John Wick: Chapter 4 on the horizon, the series is rapidly ramping up the stakes, and the new film is going to break a record for the franchise. According to director Chad Stahelski, John Wick: Chapter 4 is going to be the longest movie yet for the series.
Per Collider, John Wick: Chapter 4 is going to be longer than the previous three films, which fits in the pattern of both the franchise and movies in general these days. Each of the John Wick movies so far has been longer than the last, with John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum clocking in at 131 minutes (and also holding the championship belt for the longest title so far). That means John Wick: Chapter 4 will be well over two hours long. That is not exactly Avengers: Endgame, which ran a staggering three hours and two minutes, but it is not exactly brief either.
However, it does make sense for the John Wick movies to be getting longer as they go on. While the first movie started with the clear and understandable premise of “guy gets revenge on the people who killed his dog and it turns out he is the scariest guy in the world,” each successive film has gotten more tangled in assassin mythology and increasingly complex fight choreography. John Wick: Chapter 4 will feature Keanu Reeves going fully to war with the much feared High Table who seem to control the entire world just beneath the surface of everyday life, so Chad Stahelski and Reeves probably need a bit of extra runtime to cover some stuff.
It probably also makes a difference that John Wick: Chapter 4 has the most impressive and largest cast so far of the series. After all, if you have managed to get martial arts legend Donnie Yen to appear in your film to fight Keanu Reeves, you are probably not going to skimp on the amount of screentime you give him. John Wick: Chapter 4 will also co-star Pennywise himself, Bill Skarsgård, Clancy Brown, Scott Adkins, and the inimitable Hiroyuki Sanada. All of those people deserve to get as many minutes as John Wick can spare to kill him (hopefully Hiroyuki Sanada doesn’t die). And then there is the returning cast of Ian McShane, Laurence Fishburne, and Lance Reddick, so there is a lot of potential for John Wick: Chapter 4 to be a pretty overstuffed movie.
On the other hand, the John Wick franchise has managed to keep itself firing at a rapid pace even as the lore of its world gets ever more complicated, so we can probably trust that Chad Stahelski and Keanu Reeves will be able to keep John Wick: Chapter 4 on its rails. We can only hope.
