Hollywood seems to be running out of new ideas, which could be a big reason why its $200 million movies are tanking. From various Marvel and DC projects to prestige films like Killers of the Flower Moon, formerly sure things have been emerging as duds these days.
But as the original John Wick movie hits its 10th anniversary this week, it’s the perfect time to reflect on how Hollywood failed to recognize the way one hitman’s homicidal rampage to avenge his dead dog actually wrote the new playbook on how to build original movie franchises in this IP-era of Hollywood.
Since the Baba Yaga’s debut in 2014, there have been a ton of clones (Monkey Man, Sisu, Nobody, Violent Night, and even In a Valley of Violence, which is about Ethan Hawke getting revenge after his dog is murdered—but in the Old West). Hollywood has no problem cloning successes, but it never quite figured out what specifically made John Wick such a worthy investment. If it did, we’d be drowning in lower-budget original IP today.
John Wick’s producer, Basil Iwanyk, spelled out the secret of the franchise’s success in the book by Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman, saying:
“I was in the market for action movies. Action movies you could make for $25 million plus or minus five. It’s the most obvious thing in the world, but nobody seems to understand that. If you hit the number right, which is not hard to do, your downside’s protected, but you still have a tremendous upside.”
I’d say after four entries, $1 billion in box office revenue, and a TV series spin-off, Iwanyk nailed it, which is wild considering it all started with a $20-$30 million investment. But when Iwanyk says “it’s not hard to do,” he’s being modest. A few lucky things had to fall into place for John Wick to come in on budget and for it to turn out as well as it did.
The film’s first lucky break was finding an action star in a slump.
Breaking the Slump
Listen, there’s no doubt that Keanu Reeves is a star, but, in the early 2010s, his stock was definitely down. Movies like 47 Ronin, Man of Tai Chi, and The Day the Earth Stood Still sure made it seem like the heights of Reeves’ Matrix days were behind him.
It was around this time when Reeves’ agent was trying to drum up some action work for his client when he reached out to his old friend, Basil Iwanyk, who sent over a freshly acquired script about a 75-year-old hitman who goes on a spree after his dog is murdered. This was accompanied by a note for Reeves: “Clearly, you’re not 75.”
This “hitman coming out of retirement” role was perfect for the actor—an action star on the verge of his 50s—who understood the discipline of learning complex fight choreography, and which would serve him well when portraying the Baba Yaga. Frankly, he also needed a win.
And Iwanyk needed someone like Reeves, a recognizable face for the poster, a proven box-office draw (albeit not at that moment), and much-needed ammo for an independent film producer trying to keep his antsy financiers at bay.
But as an indie action movie, if Iwanyk wanted to splurge on Number One on the call sheet, he was going to have to cut back on budget elsewhere.
Enter directors Chad Stahelski and David Leitch.
Being Thrifty
The pair go way back in stunt work. Stahelski worked as a stunt double for Brandon Lee on The Crow and for Reeves on The Matrix movies. Leitch also had an impressive stunt resume, including for titles like V for Vendetta, I Am Legend, and Blade.
But Stahelski and Leitch weren’t just stunt guys. They were also entrepreneurs, and in 1997 they had a great idea. The two started the action design company 87eleven, which helps filmmakers choreograph and create pre-vis movie fights. Basically, they used their gym to test out and improvise fight choreography and camera angles that would inform how the scene would eventually be shot.
Action movies are expensive, but 87eleven’s ability to design fights in a gym with a small, relatively inexpensive team is a huge boon for a small-budgeted action flick, because it makes the creative process cheaper, thus allowing for more of the budget to be put on screen. Plus, when they actually shoot the scene, it's all business. They already know the moves they need to execute and the shots needed to make it all work in the editing room.
So while Reeves is just stacking bodies during a home invasion, or in a night club, or in a parking lot, almost no time was wasted while shooting because Stahelski and Leitch did their homework. Everything, from the blocking, to the camera work, to the digital squibs were planned before anyone walked on set.
Remember, Iwanyk was convinced that if he could make John Wick for under $25 million, there was no way he could lose money. Using the 87eleven method allowed the team to think cheap and minimize the time needed to do the expensive part: shooting the fights.
Shooting the Fights
The necessity for the film to come in on budget no matter what led to one of the franchise’s oft-imitated aesthetic decisions: the long, unbroken action takes. When the first film came out, the filmmakers claimed it was a stylistic choice. But by the time John Wick 3 arrived, the truth was revealed: Most of what they did with long takes was because they couldn’t afford a second camera.
It’s just another example of the old adage “limitation breeds creativity.” Arguably, John Wick’s primary stylistic contribution to the genre was born because they didn’t have the budget to shoot their action scenes the way a larger-budgeted movie would have. Later, when The High Table minted more coins for bigger sequels, Stahelski (who would take on sole director credit for the follow-up films) didn’t go to the bigger-budget way of doing things. Instead, he and the team innovated more (but we’ll get to the sequels in a bit).
Car Chases on the Cheap
Fight scenes alone do not a great action franchise make: Car chases are also a must. John Wick’s climactic car chase—where John basically uses his car as a weapon to swipe, hit, and otherwise incapacitate the goons of Michael Nyqvist’s Viggo long enough to reach out and shoot them—has a little bit of everything that a great car chase needs: e-brake 180s, donuts, cars getting absolutely totaled… and falling from high places. It’s all there!
Nothing about shooting car chases is cheap. But just because the production wasn’t able to flash the cash yet, it was still able to squeeze in a quality third-act chase, and it’s a masterclass in cutting corners to save money without sacrificing the cinematic thrills. Stahelski and Leitch made two really thrifty choices to pull it off.
First, the chase takes place in one location. While I’m sure it wasn’t cheap to lock down the Brooklyn Navy Yard, it had to be cheaper than paying to close down multiple city streets, which in New York can definitely be pricey. By localizing the car chase to one location, and shooting at night when there’s not a ton of dock work happening, the production was able to stretch its budget.
The other thing they did was use reasonably priced modern cars. Vehicles like Wick’s Dodge Challenger and the mob’s Chevy Tahoes are such ubiquitous cars in the U.S., they look like they rolled off a Hertz lot that morning. Plus, to get all the shots they needed, the team had to buy multiple versions of each car. Sure, Challengers and Tahoes aren’t the cheapest, but they are by no means luxury or classic cars, which when used could dramatically increase the cost of a chase.
Would it have been nice to see John tool around in that sick Chevelle we see in later films, doing donuts and shooting goons? Sure. But does the car John was driving make or break the scene? No. And that’s a big part of what made the John Wick filmmakers so good at their job: They made calculated choices on how to maximize their budget… for maximum action.
When John Wick was released in 2014, it made $86 million worldwide on its $25 million budget, proving Iwanyk to be correct on his gamble. That almost 4x return from just the box office, never mind physical and digital media sales and streaming rights, would prove to be more than enough money to double down on a follow-up and do what sequels do best: Escalate the action.
"I was in the market for action movies you could make for $25 million plus or minus five. It’s the most obvious thing in the world … If you hit the number right … your downside’s protected, but you still have a tremendous upside."
– Basil Iwanyk
The Sequels: Doubling Down on the Action
One of the main things that made the John Wick franchise so successful was that the franchise’s formula was distilled so clearly in the first one, and so all the filmmakers had to do was improve on it in the sequels. John Wick 1 was so elegantly simple plot-wise that it allowed the filmmakers to focus on the action. And because the success of the franchise has been in leveraging its creativity to not think outside the box, but in it, every sequel has built upon that philosophy.
John Wick: Chapter 2
For John Wick: Chapter 2, the budget was doubled to $40 million, and you can see where it went within the first minute of the film.
Gone are the cars that look like they were rented that morning. John could now afford to fuck up a few classic Mustangs as he tears around a taxi depot wiping out what’s left of the Russian mob from the first film.
The fight scenes also featured more complex combat styles. Reeves trained for months, learning 3-gun shooting, which made the film’s gun fu fights significantly more sophisticated than the first.
And then there was the house of mirrors set, an excellent piece of production design that took all the elements of an iconic John Wick scene—brutal hand-to-hand combat, interesting lighting, long-take camera work, and utilizing the location as an active character in the fight—and used the budget to push the sequence into another echelon of production value that the first film couldn’t hope to afford.
John Wick: Chapter 2 was another success for the franchise, making $171 million worldwide—not Avengers money, but enough to ensure that being “excommunicado” wasn’t going to stop The High Table from exacting their revenge on John… while cameras rolled, of course.
John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum
For John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum, the budget almost doubled again, this time to $75 million. And again the Wick team found success by working with their limitations and using more of the same ingredients that made the previous entries successful.
The film’s production design is the perfect example of this. Stahelski and company needed to design a new set that would push the John Wick philosophy that a place could be character itself. And what’s cooler than having ninjas hiding in a house made out of glass where you can’t hide anything?
Talk about limitations breeding creativity. To pull off this illusion, multiple departments had to work together to realize a setting that offered tantalizingly small slivers of shadow for the ninjas to hide in plain sight. But that was all just lighting and camera blocking; let us not forget the brutal fight choreography, stunt work, and many glass panes that had to give their lives for this fight to be so exhilarating.
The glass house set might have been the film’s most sophisticated piece of production design, but the film’s most sophisticated fight was definitely the one involving Halle Berry’s “dog fu” at the mint. Her character’s Belgian Malinos were trained since birth for this fight scene, not only to listen and act on command, but more importantly to stay calm on set… especially one as hectic as a John Wick production.
Safety is paramount, not only for the dogs but also the stunt performers. When 60 pounds of murder floof is coming for your arm, your leg, or your balls, you want to make sure the dog is hitting its mark.
The Malinos fight wasn’t the only sequence where Parabellum was pushing the limits of animal action, though. Reeves did extensive equestrian training so he could do all the stunt riding in the horse chase through the streets of Brooklyn. They even built a huge rig to shoot the scene. It did pretty much everything: held all the safety wires for the star and the horse; had cameras mounted everywhere; and even had programmable lights to make it look like John Wick and his trusty steed were running past street lights.
While all this was done for real, the crew did have to lay down rubber pads on the road to make it safe for the horse to run on, which meant all the streets had to be digitally replaced.
In fact, this was the first Wick film to lean heavily into visual effects. The motorcycle katana fight on the Verrazano Bridge was pretty much all CGI, and they relied on CGI for the glass and some throwing knifes in a knife fight—mostly because that was probably the only safe way to shoot these things.
Parabellum was the franchise’s biggest success at that time, bringing in over $327 million worldwide. That’s the kind of return that gets you a nine-figure budget for a sequel, and for John Wick: Chapter 4, that’s exactly what happened.
John Wick: Chapter 4
Coming in at two hours and 50 minutes, with only by John Wick, Chapter 4 provides an obnoxious amount of time for action that Chad Stahelski gleefully filled.
With a $100 million budget, they designed action sequences so bombastic the filmmakers could actually tweak the tried and true formula for John’s final showdown with The High Table. The Arc de Triomphe “car fu” fight is the perfect example of this expanded ambition, and arguably the most sophisticated sequence of the franchise. It's a car chase, a shootout, and a brawl all in one.
Despite not actually being shot on location at the Arc, it’s not any less impressive, mostly because all the stunts and action are still real. Besides all the training and prep, it took a small army of stunt people to do all the driving, combat, and collisions, using dummy cars—that would be replaced in post—to make the impacts feel more real. The result is an action scene that used CGI not to fake any of the stunts, but to transpose the action from an airport in Germany to the Arc.
But the one thing that’s for sure not fake: Keanu Reeves power-sliding to pick up his gun. It took a few takes, but he actually did it.
This sequel also features multiple locales that prove Chapter 4 was at the top of the series’ set-design game. The Osaka Continental fight alone could have been the climax in any of the other movies, but that was just an amuse-bouche for Killa’s (Scott Adkins) night club and the stair fight, which all do what John Wick production design is known for: visually stylized locations that do their part to get in John’s way, while still not giving all the nameless goons a prayer of a chance.
The High Table
It may have taken four films for The High Table to finally put John Wick into an early grave, but they provided some of the most iconic action to come out of Hollywood in the past decade. It’s insane to think that John Wick managed to single-handedly fight his way into what’s left of our monoculture, despite not being a beloved comic, novel, or intellectual property of some sort. While the sequels continued to expand the aesthetic horizons of modern action sequences by going bigger and bigger, none have matched the brilliance of the first.
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The first John Wick’s plot makes the viewer instantly empathize with the reluctant hero, which is the key to the whole franchise. Basil Iwanyk understood that when you pan for gold, if you’re really lucky, you might not find huge nuggets, but a little bit of gold dust. The empathy that was baked into the plot of John Wick 1 was the gold dust, and all it took was $25 million to prove there was a vein of gold just waiting, rich with action.
To me, John Wick is an even more impressive success than the MCU, not because of the subjective quality of the films, or the amount of money made at the box office, but because at one time John Wick was just a movie script on a pile of other scripts. It had no fans. It had no outside hype. It was just fate. Basil Iwanyk was looking for a $25 million action movie to produce, he stumbled on an aging hit man tale, and over four films turned it into one of the few new original movie franchises to gross over $1 billion. The best stories always have humble beginnings. If Hollywood wants to show audiences something new and cool, it just needs to start small and give them time to grow.