Last year, John Wick: Chapter 2 built on the world and the narrative introduced by the first movie but went bigger in just about every way, boasting a larger budget, a longer runtime, and a significantly higher body count. And seeing how that movie ended with Keanu Reeves’ character on the kill list of almost the entire global assassin community, it’s unlikely that director Chad Stahelski has any intention of scaling things down for next year’s John Wick 3: Parabellum.
In fact, in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, the filmmaker claimed that the third movie’s kill count will “land slightly north” of the corresponding figure for Chapter 2. To put this into perspective, while the first John Wick reportedly saw 77 deaths, the sequel comfortably topped that with a brutal 128. At this rate, you’d think that John was just one movie away from slaughtering the entire assassin community singlehandedly, though that wouldn’t leave much room for future spinoffs like the upcoming TV series The Continental.
Whether John himself might be among the victims remains a key question, but even if Reeves’ character ultimately goes down shooting, Stahelski recently mentioned that he could keep making movies in this fictional world for the rest of his career if the viewer demand was there.
At the moment, however, the focus is on this next film, which Stahelski claims will serve as “a little bit of an origin story” for its lead. Sure enough, we already know that John has a history with Anjelica Huston and Halle Berry’s characters, the latter of whom was confirmed a few days ago to own a pair of dogs that are considered symbolic of someone she’s lost. Given what happened to John’s equivalent pet, you have to wonder if the canine body count will also be going up for the threequel, but we’ll find out when John Wick 3: Parabellum hits theaters on May 17th, 2019.