“He’s always like, ‘I can’t do this again'”: Keanu Reeves’ One Request for John Wick 4 Forced Director to Change the Ending
John Wick: Chapter 4 looked like the last the audience will see of the legendary assassin. In his last duel with High Table, in which he was victorious, John Wick got shot and collapsed on the stairs of Sacré Coeur in Paris. It seemed like the character played by the Hollywood heartthrob Keanu Reeves died. His seeing a vision of his late wife Helen, kind of cemented the fact that he is dead.
This was not the ending that the makers had planned.
Keanu Reeves’s One Request to the Makers of John Wick
Fans were shocked when John Wick Producer Basil Iwanyk revealed how Keanu Reeves‘ one request changed how John Wick’s story concluded. The actor wanted his character to die because playing him had gotten too overwhelming for The Matrix actor.
However, it wasn’t the first time that Reeves wanted the makers to kill off his character.
As Iwanyk revealed in an interview with Collider:
“After the second, third, and fourth movie, making these films is so exhausting and it destroys Keanu, physically and emotionally. By the end, he’s always like, ‘I can’t do this again,’ and we agree with him. The guy is just a shell of himself because he just goes off and goes for it. He was like, ‘I wanna be definitively killed at the end of this movie.’”
It’s saddening for his fans to know that Reeves wasn’t happy doing these films.
Read More: Lionsgate Gambles Everything on Keanu Reeves, Confirms John Wick 5 Will Never Happen Without Actor
Keanu Reeves’s Request Was Not Completely Agreed To
Keanu Reeves’s suggestion changed the ending but it wasn’t agreed to the fullest. The ending was borderline ambiguous as the vision Wick saw could have just been a hallucination. The makers left a slight possibility of Reeves’s return. As Iwanyk told Collider:
“We were like, ‘You know, we’ll leave a 10% little opening.”
The slight ambiguity the end scene created, suggests that there is a possibility of a John Wick Chapter 5. However, it is clear that Reeves is not keen on returning to the franchise.
The Alternate Ending to John Wick: Chapter 4
Now that it is known that the ending was changed upon Reeves’s request; it raises the obvious question: What was the original ending? Good thing, there is an answer available. Earlier this year, Chad Stahelski, the director of John Wick: Chapter 4, revealed that they had planned an ending that was filmed and tested. In his interview with Empire Magazine, Stahelski said:
“We had a different ending. 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.”
Seems like Reeves’ request overrode the sample reception of the previous ending. However, the one that made the final cut offered a perfect conclusion to Wick’s story.
John Wick: Chapter 4 is available to stream on Starz.
Source: Collider and Empire Magazine
