Audiences can’t get enough of the puppy-avenging mercenary John Wick, played by Keanu Reeves. The 2014 film has already spawned three sequels (with another on the way), a TV series, and its first spin-off film “Ballerina” (again with more to come). But all that wasn’t enough and we are getting an anime movie too!
Chad Stahelski, who has directed all of the live-action “John Wick” films, confirmed the project is “…knee-deep in development on a feature anime about John Wick. It’s a prequel to the movies, which is awesome. It’s fun that it’s in a different medium.”
The Plot
Stahelski alluded to this film being about the “impossible task” that caused John to retire and enjoy married life.
“Ish. You’re pretty right on, but it’s animated fun. It’s meant to be fun,” Stahelski explained. “Some of the prequels and sequels that you see in other franchises, we’re not meant to be built that way. We just want to have fun. We want to have fun with the Wick world, but we’ve already capped it on one end [with John Wick: Chapter 4], so let’s go back and use a different medium.”
“That’s also what’s fun about the TV show [Under the High Table] that Rob Levine, the showrunner, has designed,” he adds. “It’s in the John Wick universe, and it’s about all the ancillary characters other than John Wick. So you can explore things that we couldn’t do in the features. To keep churning out episodes of John Wick’s adventures seems a little false to us, but to explore different aspects of the world and different aspects of John Wick before the films and through a different medium, whether it’s anime or TV, that feels fun. We can be a little bit more crazy and nutty in the anime, and we can be a lot more explicit in our storytelling and world building on the TV show. So those are exciting to us without seeming repetitive, and that’s where we’re putting our energies right now.”
Plus, animation allows for past and present storylines not to worry about Reeves’ age. Despite claims of the actor being a timelord, his ability to keep up with such a physically demanding role won’t last forever. The “Evil Dead” franchise is currently moving towards animation and non-Ash Williams (Bruce Campbell) based stories for this exact reason.
Stahelski on The Future of “John Wick“
Even with the shifting focus, both Stahelski and Reeves still intend to “gatekeep” upcoming projects.
“We’d seen other franchises go through interesting changes, and we were just like, ‘We need somebody at the gates.’ We wanted to do the TV show, the anime and other John Wick projects and spinoffs…Keanu and I have been in rooms where other entities would give notes, and somebody would say, ‘Well, we don’t think that’s very John Wick.’ Keanu and I then looked at each other, and I was like, ‘I don’t know. That’s John Wick right there. Hey, Keanu, do you think it’s John Wick?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, fuckin’ A, that’s John Wick’…So as more and more voices come in, it’s more and more important to have at least that one voice as a stop-gate,” say Stahelski.
We’ll keep you posted on updates about the “John Wick” anime series as they become available. Stahelski is currently prepping his retelling of “Highlander” starring Henry Cavill.
