Keanu Reeves Officially Returns for New John Wick Prequel

John Wick is back…but maybe not in the way you might have expected. Keanu Reeves will return as cinema’s deadliest assassin in a new prequel film detailing a key moment in his life before his movie franchise began. And don’t worry about having to de-age Keanu with CG, because that won’t be necessary.

John Wick exploded into theaters in 2014, vaulting star Reeves into the upper echelons of action stardom. Reeves starred as the retired assassin of the title, who returned to his old ways when his dog, the last gift from his late wife, was callously killed by the upstart heir to a criminal empire. After killing his way to the top, Wick soon found himself entrapped in the assassin life once more in a series of sequels, hunted by every other hitman and bounty hunter on Earth before seemingly going to his final rest in 2022’s John Wick: Chapter 4. However, he still managed to find time to appear in the spin-off movie Ballerina, set before that film, in which he faced off with the title character, played by Ana de Armas.

Lionsgate has greenlit an animated John Wick movie, in which Reeves will reprise his role as the iconic assassin. But don’t expect to find out how (or if) Wick survived his apparent demise at the conclusion of John Wick 4. The movie will be a prequel that will explore Wick’s life before he gave up the assassin life and retired, as we first met him in the original John Wick. It will detail how he accomplished the so-called ‘Impossible Task” that allowed him to escape the all-consuming criminal underworld and retire to be with his beloved wife, Helen. The film is set to be directed by Shannon Tindle (Ultraman: Rising), from a script by Ryan and Kaz Firpo (Eternals). Reeves and Chad Stahelski, who directed all four previous Wick movies, will executive produce with Thunder Road’s Basil Iwanyk and Erica Lee.

Four action series. One of them is built around exactly the way you
handle pressure, people, and a room that has just gone very quiet. Here is where you would survive
the trilogy, and probably headline it.

You are precision with a grudge. You don’t posture, you don’t
escalate, and you don’t warn anybody twice. That is exactly why the people who know you are
so careful never to be the reason you start.

• The Wick films run on discipline: an underworld with actual etiquette, a hero who
  honours every rule of it, and a world that unravels the instant someone breaks one
  against him.
• You share that quality. You are extraordinarily reasonable right up to the line, and
  then completely immovable past it.
• Focus, commitment and sheer will. You’d be the one carrying grief through three sequels
  and turning it into technique rather than noise.
• People wouldn’t call you dangerous. They’d say your name quietly and let that do the
  work.

You understand the thing the whole franchise is secretly about:
the cars are spectacular, but the crew is the point. You collect people, you keep them, and
you’d drive through a building for any one of them.

• This series went from street racing to orbit without ever changing its actual subject,
  because loyalty scales and plot doesn’t have to.
• You have the same instinct. You build a family out of whoever turns up, and then you
  defend it past the point of reason.
• You’d thrive here because the franchise rewards exactly your strengths: warmth, nerve,
  an absolute refusal to leave anyone behind, and a relaxed relationship with physics.
• The mission can wait. The barbecue cannot.

You over-prepare and then take the dangerous part yourself
anyway. It looks like control, but it’s really responsibility. You have never worked out how
to ask somebody else to carry the risk.

• This is the franchise of the plan that collapses on schedule: the team, the mask, the
  rooftop, and the one person sprinting flat out because sprinting is all that’s left.
• You share that refusal to accept an outcome. Told the odds, you treat them as an
  administrative error.
• You’d thrive here because these films reward competence and loyalty in equal measure.
  The mission matters, but nobody on the team gets left on the wrong side of a door.
• Some people delegate the cliff. You have never once been that person.

You are not the most trained person in the building, the best
equipped, or the one anybody would have picked. You are simply the one still standing at the
end, which turns out to be the only qualification that matters.

• Die Hard invented the modern action hero by making him mortal: outgunned, out-planned,
  bleeding, and extremely funny about it.
• You share that stubbornness. Adversity doesn’t make you noble, it makes you sarcastic,
  and then it makes you unstoppable.
• You’d thrive here because these films reward improvisation and nerve over preparation,
  and you’ve never had the luxury of preparing anyway.
• You didn’t want any of this. You just declined to be the person who let it happen.

What’s Next for John Wick?

John Wick will return in John Wick 5; Reeves has signed on to star, but details about that film are being kept at the High Table for the time being. However, one other spin-off is well underway: Caine, starring Donnie Yen as the blind swordsman of the title who aided Wick in John Wick 4, completed filming last summer. Yen also directs the film, which stars Rina Sawayama, Dacre Montgomery, Mason Thames, Bill Nighy, and Zhuang Dafei.

An animated John Wick movie is in development; no release date has yet been announced. Stay tuned to Collider for future updates.

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