Warning: this post contains spoilers for the end of John Wick: Chapter 4.
As the Fast and Furious movies, the John Wick saga began with relative modesty. The fast and the furious, released in the summer of 2001, was about thieves racing hot rods. the original John Wick, from 2014, was about a hitman avenging his murdered puppy. Over the course of his four films (and an upcoming spin-off and an upcoming TV series), his world has expanded dramatically and often absurdly. It’s so big that maybe John Wick will come back for a fifth movie… in spite of himself, you know, he ate it at the end of the fourth round.
So, is John Wick really dead at the end of chapter 4?
The answer is: Yes, probably, maybe, but maybe not. It certainly seemed like he did at the time. At the climax, Keanu Reeves’ Wick takes on Donnie Yen’s Caine, a blind assassin working for the film’s big bad, Bill Skarsgard’s Marquis Vincent Bisset de Gramont. Caine fatally wounds Wick… but before he croaks, he has enough energy to take down the Marquis. Wick then collapses down the stairs and passes into infinity. We soon see his grave, which is next to his late wife.
Of course, we didn’t see Wick’s corpse being embalmed and placed in that coffin, or see it being cremated, if that’s how he wished to do it. So like the Fast and Furious movies, which keep bringing back downcast characters from the dead, it looks like we’ll be seeing this John Wick guy again. After all, these movies make enough money to raise anyone from the grave.