Warning: This post contains spoilers for the ending of John Wick: Chapter 4.
Like 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 who race hot rods. The original John Wick, from 2014, was about a hitman avenging his murdered puppy. Over its four films (and a forthcoming spinoff, and a forthcoming TV series), its world has greatly and often absurdly expanded further. It’s so big that John Wick may be coming back for a fifth film…despite him, y’know, eating it at the end of round four.
So did John Wick actually die at the end of Chapter 4?
The answer is: Yes, probably, maybe, although maybe not. It certainly seemed like he had at the time. In the climax, Keanu Reeves’ Wick duels 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 shoot the Marquis dead. Wick then collapses on the staircase and passes into the infinite. 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 into that coffin, or see him being cremated, if that’s the way he wished to go. So like the Fast and Furious films, which keep bringing felled characters back from the dead, it appears we’ll see that John Wick guy again. After all, these movies make enough money to bring anyone back from the grave.
