Sleek, stylish, over-the-top violence has become the calling card of theJohn Wickfranchise, with the title character regularly mowing down leagues of assassins on his quest to avenge his dog’s death and retire from a life of being the world’s greatest killer. In an interview, the creator of the series, Chad Stahelski revealed that the first draft of the originalJohn Wickscript featured much less violence and only 3 deaths.
“I think [Keanu Reeves] sent [the script] to me on a Friday and I read it maybe that day and thought about it over the weekend. It was much more contained. I think only three people died in the original script, two were in a car crash. It was very, very minimal, and it was slightly different. I read it, and I’d always had this idea about Greek mythology and how to tell more a fablestic kind of story, make a surreal action movie so it wasn’t so grounded and gray, just something different.”
That ‘something different’ turned out to be the incarnation of Wick that audiences fell in love with in theaters, a larger-than-life angel of vengeance with a broken heart and a breathtaking capacity for destruction that resulted in approximately 80 deaths in the firstJohn Wick, 128 deaths in the sequel, and 94 deaths inJohn Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum. ForChad Stahelski, the objective is not to keep increasing the kill count with each new installment in the franchise, but make the number of deaths proportional to Wick’s actions during fight sequences.
“People joke about it [the kill count], but the way I choreograph with my guys and stuff, we just choreograph motion and set pieces and we try to get this balletic kind of dance, live performance feel to everything. It’s just when you shoot people in the head, they can’t get back up so you can reuse a stunt guy. Every time Keanu moves, he does two half circles. He’s killed five guys. So I got to keep using more and more stunt guys.”
The sheer number of goons inJohn Wickmovies has been asource of many jokeson the internet, especially the scenes where a clean-shaven thug dies in one part of the movie, only to reappear in later scenes disguised as a different thug sporting a heavy beard only to die again. For Stahelski, having a large number of bad guys in the narrative is the only way to keep up with Keanu Reeves' growing virtuosity when it comes to playing Wick in action-mode.
“I think, just by nature, because Keanu’s gotten so much better with the choreography and the martial arts and the motion and we change weapons so much and we get bigger set pieces, that, just by its very nature, because the scene grows, the body count grows. But we don’t start off going, ‘Okay, what was in number three? How do we beat it for number four?’ We just choreograph and it happens.”
