- This text contains spoilers about ‘John Wick 4’ and its post-credits scene. Continue reading at your own risk.
As it couldn’t be less, ‘John Wick 4’ has arrived in theaters around the world to sweep the box office with a new dose of that ultra-stylish action and past twists and turns brand of the house and, of course, the people of Lionsgate have no intention of letting his new goose that laid the golden eggs die with new projects and spin-off of the franchise.
unfinished revenge
As I told you, the producer Erica Lee dropped that two of the names with the most ballots to return to the big screen are Lawrence Fishburne’s Bowery King and Rina Sawayama’s Akira, who starred in the first post-credit scene of the saga. In it, we could see how the former janitor of the Osaka Continental was about to complete his revenge against Caine after he murdered his father.
Fortunately or unfortunately, the blood did not reach the river in the scene, which leaves the feud unfinished by cutting to black right after Akira pulls out a knife with not very good intentions. Nevertheless, the initial intention of Chad Stahelski and his team was to be much more explicitbut they ended up discarding the idea so as not to saturate us with several consecutive low moments.
This was explained by the director in CinemaBlend.
“Keanu and I are always laughing like, ‘It should be like Hard Boiled. We have to kill everyone.’ So we tried it with Akira, Rina’s character was doing more than just trying. We put it right after the end of the movie, so it was like a comedown, after another comedown, after another comedown. In the end, as you know, despite all the corpses piled up, Keanu and I are very hopeful. We don’t like that dystopian thing about ‘ it’s all bleak.’ I know it seems weird when we do it, but at the end of the day, you know, we want to leave you with a positive feeling.”
According to Stahelski, this seems to be the exception to the talk about consequences that they have been exploring since the first ‘John Wick’ of 2014.
“We wanted to do something, but it was weird to leave it undone because I love Akira. I love the character of Rina. I love the character of Donnie and in our world, if you do bad things, bad things happen. We did a bad thing. We’ve been talking nine years about ‘consequences.’ It would have been a little weird if we hadn’t shown a consequence. So that’s our dark side, I would say.”
The good thing about all this is that, after the apparent death of John -or only Wick?- at the end of the fourth installment, having left the fates of Caine and Akira in the air might allow to play with them in the future. The options are almost endless.
“I think it’s cool because you don’t know. Maybe Akira doesn’t kill him. Maybe it’s just a moment. I like movies that leave a small part to the viewer. I love books and narratives like that. That’s why I always I’ve been drawn to myths. Whether it’s Odysseus or Orpheus or Dante’s Inferno, he always leaves you with that little question mark. Did he do it? Was it a fever dream? All we know is John wakes up in the first movie like, ‘Oh my gosh, that was a dream!'”
As far as I’m concerned, I need an Akira spin-off with Rina Sawayama for yesterday.
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