John Wick 5 is greenlit – will likely shoot back-to-back with 4

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

It didn't take long for JOHN WICK to become the little action franchise which could. After the success of the first film, Lionsgate got the ball rolling on JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 2, which was then followed by JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 3 – PARABELLUM. Mere days after the release of the third installment, the studio announced that JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 4 was in the works, and now it seems that JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 5 is in our future as well.

During today's Lionsgate earnings call, CEO John Feltheimer revealed a tidbit about the action franchise, saying, "We’re also busy preparing scripts for the next two installments of our John Wick action franchise, with John Wick 4 slated to hit theatres Memorial Day weekend 2022." Not only is a fifth installment of JOHN WICK in the works, but Feltheimer said that they "hope to shoot both John Wick 4 & 5 back to back when Keanu becomes available early next year." I'm always down for more of Keanu Reeves dishing out headshots left and right, so I'm a happy man. In addition to the two new sequels, Lionsgate is also developing The Continental, a Starz TV series which will hopefully premiere sometime after the release of JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 4.

The COVID-19 shutdown forced the release date of JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 4 to be pushed back, but franchise director Chad Stahelski said earlier this year that the additional time has been good for the creative team.

Obviously, the Wicks aren’t formulaic or anything like that, so it takes a little while to kind of come up with the thematics we want to do and how nutty and subversive we want to be on storytelling. So, it’s been a lot of back and forth to really try and crack what we want to do with the next John Wick. There’s so many ideas to go with, between the action design, the set pieces and where we would want to shoot all that stuff. So, that’s been good for us. Time is always good when you’re in development. I’m fortunate enough to not have to run into the danger of too much time on anything I’ve done, so this has been nice to try and figure things out. What ideas survive the next day test.

Stahelski added that there were several elements he originally intended to include in the third film but pulled out to save for the fourth. "I like thematics," Stahelski said. "Obviously, you can see the influences of the old Westerns and the old Samurai films. All the Arthurian tales for chivalry and all that kind of stuff, back to that. We had a couple of overlapping thematics, and I stripped it down to the bare essentials. And there were two action sequences that we had really kind of conceived, but we just didn’t have room for them. So, we pulled them from the movie. And I’d like to think that 90 percent of what I pulled, there’s a place in John Wick 4 that I can definitely reinsert them." JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 4 is currently slated for a May 27, 2022 release.