"John Wick: Chapter 4" Almost Had a Very Different Ending

There’s a long history of movies’ original endings being altered before the finished product reached screens all over the world. Fatal Attraction might be the most famous example of this, but it’s far from alone; Die Hard With a Vengeance also has a memorable alternate ending featuring Bruce Willis, Jeremy Irons and a rocket launcher. And then there’s Clue, which has three endings that offer audiences very different takes on the action that’s come before it.

And now, you can add John Wick: Chapter 4 to that list.

Spoilers for the film in question follow. If you’ve seen Chapter 4, you’ll know that it ends with the title character defeating the Marquis de Gramont — but at the expense of (apparently) his own life. It’s possible that this is the end of the line for Wick — but evidently, a different ending was shot that suggested a different fate for Reeves’s character.

In a recent interview with Empire, director Chad Stahelski offered some details on the alternate ending. “We shot an ending where you actually saw John Wick at the end of the movie. So it was very clear that he was still alive,” Stahelski said. “The audiences we tested with absolutely preferred the ambiguous ending.”

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For now, viewers hoping to see more of the John Wick world will need to tide themselves over with the upcoming miniseries The Continental, due this fall, and the onscreen spinoff Ballerina, due out next year. As for whether or not viewers will get John Wick: Chaoter 5, that remains to be seen.