John Wick: Chapter 4director Chad Stahelski and editor Nathan Orloff have addressed the film’s runtime, which clocks in at over three hours.
The fourth installment in the action franchise,John Wick: Chapter 4will see Keanu Reeves fighting his way around the world to escape the violent life of an assassin. New characters like Donnie Yen’s Caine and Bill Skarsgård’s Marquis Vincent de Gramont will join familiar fan favorites like Laurence Fishburne’s Bowery King, Ian McShane’s Winston Scott, andthe late Lance Reddick’s Charonto aid and challenge John on his journey. Trailers for the movie promised impressive action set pieces that were bigger and better than the franchise’s previous entries. Given the action-packed trailers, fans were more daunted than surprised when theJohn Wick 4runtime was announced.
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According to Stahelski and Orloff,theJohn Wick: Chapter 4runtimewas originally even longer. “Our first cut was three hours and forty-five minutes, and it felt like three hours and forty-five minutes. We were like, oh, we’re so screwed,” Stahelski revealed in an interview withIndieWire. The director said that the nearly four-hour-long cut included all of the side characters' stories taken into account and fully serviced.John Wick: Chapter 4doesn’t simply expand the world John exists in - it expands the network he operates in. After composing the initial cut, Stahelski and Orloff were tasked with fine-tuning the story and balancing the characters' plot lines with John’s. “I wanted to make sure that he was still the center of the universe,” Orloff said, “That everything always led back to him even though we were cutting away from him.”
One aspect that didn’t get left on the cutting room floor was the action. None of theJohn Wick 4action sceneswere cut in any way in the process of decreasing the runtime by almost an entire hour. “You’ll never know if a five-minute car scene or a ten-minute car scene is good until you watch the whole movie,” Stahelski said. Stahelski’s commitment to ensuring every scene worked as intended meant that his editing team watchedJohn Wick: Chapter 4in its entirety multiple times. Stahelski revealed that even the slightest edits caused him and the editing team to re-watch the movie again. Stahelski told IndieWire that he wanted to be able to view the movie as a whole, not just as the individual scenes. Likening the experience of watching a movie to listening to a song, Stahelski said, “It’s not a piece of the song, it’s the whole song that makes you rock out.”
Although long runtimes aren’t unheard of or unusual, they can still be a detractor for audiences. Watching a movie is a commitment, and if the movie isn’t worth the time it takes up - or doesn’t look like it will be worth it - people may decide against seeing it in theaters or at all. However, franchises haven’t seemed to have this problem.Avengers: Endgameclocked in at three hours and two minutes;Avatar: The Way of Waterclocked in at three hours and twelve minutes. Neither movie had any problem bringing in audiences because both had committed fan bases that trusted the movies to deliver.TheJohn Wickfranchisehas amassed a similar following, with the first movie becoming a contemporary classic less than a decade after its release. Hopefully, fans' trust will be rewarded.
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