The John Wick franchise is now mentioned in the same breath as legendary action movies like James Bond and Mission Impossible – but the original film was very nearly vastly different than the story we love today.
The directors recently revealed that they considered not killing off the puppy in its opening scene, a choice that would have fundamentally reshaped Keanu Reeves’ character.
In a new interview on its tenth anniversary, John Wick directors Chad Stahelski and David Leitch reflected on the movie’s uncertain beginnings in 2014 when they were sure it would be sent straight to video with little fanfare.
After struggling to secure placement, they had little hope that the pre-screening would earn much audience approval, they told Business Insider this week.
To their surprise, the audience bought into the story quickly and screamed their approval as the action unfolded.
‘Keanu turned to me and said, “Hey, I think they like it!”’ Stahelski recalled. ‘We were blown away.’
The film opens memorably, setting the tone for the entire franchise (which now has four installments), with former hitman Reeves mourning the death of his wife and bonding with the puppy she left him as her final act.
When a member of the Russian mob kills the puppy, Reeves dons a now-iconic black suit and sets out on a bloody quest for revenge.
It’s been a long-held trope of cinema that if you introduce the audience to a dog and then kill that dog off, you had better have a pretty good reason because viewers are certain to react viscerally and emotionally.
This is so true that there’s even a popular website on which users can look up films to check if the dog dies, aptly named: www.doesthedogdie.com.
The brilliance of beginning John Wick this way is that viewers are certain to root for the avenging hero from that moment on.
No matter how many moral grey areas he strays into, fans are going to remember that puppy and stay glued to the screen as they wish every bad thing on the person responsible for hurting the poor little guy.
This phenomenon is at the heart of the simple brilliance of John Wick, but Leitch told Business Insider that many had their doubts about the choice.
He said: ‘We were told, “It’s bad luck.” “It’s bad juju.” “It’s ‘Old Yeller,’ you can’t do this!” “No one will want to see this on screen; you’re going to alienate the audience.”’
He explained that because the pair set out to make a ‘genre movie,’ audiences would remember ‘hardboiled moments’ like the dog’s death.
Stahelski added: ‘We were going to use a baby lens; John gets hit hard in the head, so it’s going to be dream-like; the dog death happens off-camera, and all you are going to see in the aftermath is this trail of the blood making it look like the puppy tried to crawl to him.’
Explaining how Reeves acted out the scene on the day, Stahelski shared that the beloved actor shot the scene in a beat-up pair of pajamas and acted with a stuffed dog.
He continued: ‘For the next couple of weeks it was suggested that we shoot an alternative ending revealing that the puppy actually isn’t dead. But Keanu stood up for us.’
Eventually, the directors were allowed to stick with the original concept that the dog died violently, and the film went on to be a surprise box office hit, earning over $86million on a $20million budget.
The rest, as they say, is history. John Wick did so well that it created a whole franchise of three sequels, a TV miniseries (The Continental), and soon, its first feature film spinoff (Ballerina), as well as an anime series.