If you were to try to explain the appeal of the “John Wick” franchise to someone who was unaware of Keanu Reeves’ popular action series, you could simply say, “It’s about an assassin that murders a lot of people in defense of a dog and his dead wife.” But no matter how you describe it, you have to explain that a lot of people die in the franchise. A lot of people. But according to director Chad Stahelski, the original idea for ‘Wick’ was to be much more tame and far less deadly.
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Speaking to Comicbook.com, Stahelski explained that before he was on board to direct the film, the original script for “John Wick” featured an incredibly small number of dead bodies. But obviously, by the time Stahelski was done, that number grew.
“I think [Reeves] sent it to me on a Friday and I read it maybe that day and thought about it over the weekend,” Stahelski explained. “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 fable-istic kind of story, make a surreal action movie so it wasn’t so grounded and gray, just something different.”
Film fans have gone through and counted the number of dead people in the “John Wick” trilogy. In the first film, the number sits around 80 dead. A far cry from the three in the original script, huh? And in subsequent sequels, the kill count sits at 128 and 94, respectively.
So, why did Stahelski amp up the kill count to an exponential degree? Well, according to the filmmaker, the number of deaths is less of a goal and more of a by-product of his type of action storytelling and style.
“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,” he said. “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.”
He added, “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.”
While we have no idea what’s going to happen in the upcoming “John Wick” sequels (two more are shooting back-to-back), it’s obvious that the large number of dead bodies in each film isn’t going to drastically decrease. Who knows, after everything is all said and done, perhaps Reeves’ character might have 500 dead bodies under his belt.