Keanu Reeves recently told CBS News that he’s not sure his body will be able to withstand another “John Wick” movie. The action icon has starred in four “John Wick” movies, which have grossed more than $1 billion combined, and he’ll reprise the eponymous assassin in next year’s spinoff movie “Ballerina.” But as far as “John Wick 5” is concerned, that might depend on the health of Reeves’ knees.
“You can never say never,” Reeves said. “My knees right now are saying ‘I can’t do another “John Wick.”‘ So my heart does but I don’t know if my knees can do it.”
“John Wick: Chapter 4” ended with John’s presumable death after competing in a duel to free himself from the High Table. John gets shot in the third round of the duel and seemingly dies on the steps of the Basilica of Sacré Coeur while seeing a vision of his late wife, Helen. The film then cuts to a a final scene of Winston (Ian McShane) and the Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne) visiting John’s gravestone.
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Reeves previously pulled the “never say never” card about “John Wick 5” in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, adding: “I mean, I wouldn’t do a ‘John Wick’ film without [director] Chad Stahelski. We’d have to see what that looked like. For me, it feels really right that John Wick finds peace.”
The ambiguous ending of “John Wick: Chapter 4” has led many fans to wonder if Reeves will return for a fifth “John Wick” movie. In an interview with Empire magazine last year, director Chad Stahelski revealed for the first time that a more concrete ending to “Chapter 4” was filmed and tested. In this version of the film, there was no question that John Wick survived the events of the duel.
“We had a different ending,” Stahelski said. “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.”
That ending clashed with Reeves’ original preference to kill John Wick off for good. Franchise producer Basil Iwanyk told Collider around the sam time that Reeves begged the “John Wick” team to kill him off at the end of “John Wick: Chapter 4.” It was par for the course for Reeves, who is so physically drained after filming each “John Wick” installment that it’s tough to return for more. In this case, the producers once again did not entirely listen to their star.
“After the second, third, and fourth movie, making these films is so exhausting and it destroys Keanu, physically and emotionally,” Iwanyk said. “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.’ We were like, ‘You know, we’ll leave a 10% little opening.”
While Lionsgate has expressed interest in “John Wick 5” in the past, the studio does not have it on its release calendar as of now. Reeves, meanwhile, cracked open his knee during an accident on the set of his the upcoming Aziz Ansari comedy “Good Fortune.”
Reeves will be back as John Wick when spinoff movie “Ballerina” opens in theaters June 6, 2025.