For anyone worried that the John Wick franchise was destined to be a short-and-sweet trilogy, fear not.

Our beloved Baba Yaga will return for a fourth outing as Lionsgate and Summit Entertainment confirm a sequel to John Wick: Parabellum is in the works, with a proposed release date of May 21, 2021.

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Is John Wick: Parabellum the last one?

To be fair to Chad Stahelski, who has directed all the John Wick films from the very beginning, it’s not exactly a universe that deserves to be so short lived with only three amazing films. Parabellum, which was speculated to be the film to wrap the franchise up, did not end with a definitive close to John’s storyline, instead setting the character up for a continued war with the shady High Table.

So it looks like John still won’t be able to get the well-deserved rest he’s needed at the close of every previous film. I still find it bizarre that, despite the two year production gap between each film, the plots all seem to occur one after the other within the same fortnight, meaning that John probably hasn’t slept since the first twenty minutes of Chapter 1.

As part of a Q&A session on Reddit, Stahelski answered a good few questions about the future of the franchise, suggesting that box office success and audience demand made it impossible to let the series end after only three films. He also shed some light on the difficulties that he faced as the director of arguably the most beautifully choreographed action series ever produced.


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‘All of them, each for their own individual reasons,’ he said.

‘1 was difficult because we didn’t understand what we wanted to do, quite. Number 2, we had to map up a whole world we didn’t think of before. 3, how do we expand and get the audience something creative, not just bigger and cooler. Number 4, I’m certain, will be more difficult.’

It’s easy to imagine that the action sequences do need an awful lot of imagination and effort put into them to make sure the new film is better than the one before. It appears that for Stahelski, the film-every-other-year treadmill that he and the producers have found themselves on gets harder and harder to keep up with, but ultimately the audience reception makes the blood and sweat pay off.

How much money did John Wick 3 make?

After all, Parabellum demolished Avengers: Endgame by raking in an impressive $93 million in its opening weekend and becoming 2019’s highest grossing domestic release in the USA. So, really, there’s no way that Stahelski and co have any excuse to abandon plans to continue the franchise.


Via the commentary of Parabellum on Blu-Ray, Stahelski has also shed some light on John’s ultimate goal throughout the films, revealing that his quest to avoid being killed isn’t all that keeps him going. He’s also trying to stay on the path to redemption, hoping that once all his enemies are gone, he can bury his weapons for good and live a normal life with his beloved dog.

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‘John is the person he wants to be, John Wick is the person that he naturally is,’ Stehelski revealed.

‘John’s concerned with that. The contract the people trying to kill him, that’s not his primary concern I don’t think.

I think it’s looking for a type of absolution that allows to become the person he wants to be. In order to remember his wife and if he’s going to die, he’d rather die as the nice guy that his wife would want him to be. And that’s his main journey, and somewhere along all that he decides which is more important to him.’

As every new instalment of the franchise shows, John’s quest for salvation seems to only get harder and harder. In the first film, he re-enters the brutal world his wife pulled him out of in order to achieve vengeance for himself after her final gift of a puppy was killed by a trio of savage gangsters. Despite his desperation to leave that old life behind him, he finds throughout the sequels that he just can’t seem to let it go, making both John and the audience wonder exactly what aspect of his persona is more important to him.

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With the announcement of a new film, it looks like John still hasn’t found the answer to that question yet. And part of us are glad he hasn’t, because we want more of him.



When is John Wick: Chapter 4 released?

John Wick 4 will be released on 21st May, 2019