We all watched John Wick fall. The stairs, the duel, the final breath. A definitive end. A good death for a man who had earned it. The kind of conclusion that leaves a real mark, you know? It's rare.
But then, Hollywood. Lionsgate, at CinemaCon this past April, officially confirmed John Wick: Chapter 5. Which, okay. Of course they did. The franchise is a cash machine. So the question becomes: how do you bring back a character you just buried? And how do you do it without cheapening the last movie? This is the tightrope they've gotta walk.
And this is where the theories start. The best one I've heard, the one that makes the most sense if you're a film fan, not just an action-junkie, is that John actually died. His death at the end of Chapter 4 stands. And John Wick 5 won't be about him faking his death to find peace, but about him fighting his way through the afterlife. To get back to the world. Or to his wife, Helen.
Now, that sounds like a stretch. A supernatural John Wick? But the franchise has never been truly grounded. The gold coins, the High Table, the impossible rules—it's always had a mythological, almost fairy-tale quality. So why not take it to its logical extreme?
This is where my mind goes back. Twenty years. To 2005. Constantine. The Keanu Reeves film where he played a chain-smoking exorcist, navigating a secret war between Heaven and Hell. It wasn't a box-office monster, no. But it became a cult classic. A stylish, gritty, noir-inflected supernatural thriller. And in it, Reeves' character, John Constantine, literally went to Hell and had a final showdown with Lucifer himself, played with chilling, barefoot menace by Peter Stormare. Who, I should add, also played Abram Tarasov in John Wick: Chapter 2. The connections are… there.
A John Wick 5 set in the underworld would scratch an itch for a lot of us who've been waiting for a Constantine 2. The sequel's been in development hell since, well, forever. There have been some encouraging updates recently—director Francis Lawrence and Reeves are “closer than ever” to a script, according to Collider from earlier this year, but it's still just talk. It feels like a 2027 release date at the earliest. So a John Wick film that gives us a similar aesthetic, a similar story of a cynical man fighting demons (or demon-adjacent assassins) in a supernatural setting… that's a genius move. A way to give the fans what they want while they wait.
It would be a bold choice. A risky one. They could, of course, just reveal that John faked his death with the help of Winston and the Bowery King, which is the more traditional, less interesting path. But with Chad Stahelski saying they have a “really different” story for the next chapter, one that leaves the High Table behind, a journey through the underworld feels like a hell of a choice.
A masterpiece? Who knows. But a good story? Yeah, I'd watch that.
Tell me, what's your take? Should John Wick stay dead, or would a trip to the underworld be the perfect send-off? Let us know in the comments below, and check back for more on the evolving John Wick universe.
