Two months. It’s been two full months since the release of John Wick: Chapter 4, since the titular hitman probably brought his body count safely into the triple digits, since Bill Skarsgård doubled down on his villain typecasting in the best way possible, and since the title hero, who made a name for himself across four movies as an unkillable hitman, was killed.
Indeed, fans of the Keanu Reeves-led action thriller franchise got the shock of a lifetime when Baba Yaga himself gave in to his injuries on the stairs of the Sacré-Cœur, having successfully goaded Marquis into a meeting with the Grim Reaper of his own with the help of his allies.
But even two months later, some folks still just can’t believe this is the end of the road for John, and with rumors of a fifth film nowhere near the point of dying down (Lionsgate, who just made a return four times over with Chapter 4, will make doubly sure of that), the insistence from Reeves and Stahelski that John is gone is doing little to convince people.
Another John Wick star, however, has come forward to join the league of “John’s dead” absolutists. In an interview with ComicBook, Natalia Tena, who portrays John’s adoptive sister Katia, noted that even if the protagonist wasn’t physically dead, his story has reached a natural conclusion anyway, so moving forward would almost feel like an unnatural reset of the character.
“I do. I mean, even if he’s not dead physically, I think he’s dead in the sense of like he’s out, a bit like how it ends. It’s like he is, he’s earned that out. I think it doesn’t really matter. It’s just like that is the end of him for that story. I mean, I have no idea what they’re gonna do with the world, but that’s what I’m imagining.”
It’s probably high time we all faced the facts and accepted John Wick’s death with the same dignity that he did, but that doesn’t mean we can’t look forward to his return in Ballerina, the Ana de Armas-led spin-off set before the events of Chapter 4. Indeed, John Wick may be dead, but the delectable mythos of this universe, which carries the franchise just as much as Wick himself, lives on.