‘John Wick 4’ Release Date Suffers Big Delay

A new John Wick 4 release date has been announced and it reveals the action film is suffering a big delay. The film will now open on March 23, 2023. It was originally set to premiere May 21, 2021, and then was later delayed to May 27, 2022, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. There is no word on whether or not the ongoing pandemic is once again the cause of the delay.

John Wick: Chapter 4 was written by Shay Hatten and Michael Finch. The film was originally set to shoot back-to-back with John Wick 5, but Lionsgate, the production studio, opted to postpone those plans due to production plans likely attributed to the Covid-19 pandemic. John Wick: Chapter 4 was filmed from June to October 2021, and Chapter 5 will be filmed at a later date. The first John Wick came out in 2012 and made over $88 million on a budget of less than $30 million. The second film in the franchise — John Wick: Chapter 2 — opened in 2017 and made over $170 million on a $40 million budget.

John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum premiered in 2019 and raked in a worldwide revenue total of more than $325 million on a budget of less than $75 million. Collectively, the three John Wick films alone have made the franchise over a half-billion dollars. This sum is on a combined budget of somewhere under $145 million. To say that the franchise has been lucrative is quite an understatement.

However, it’s not just financial success that keeps the franchise going as each film has also been increasingly heralded by film critics. As far as Rotten Tomatoes scores go, all three films are Certified Fresh, with John Wick at 87%, John Wick: Chapter 2 at 89%, John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum at 90%. In 2017, a five-issue prequel comic book series was released, telling the story of a young John Wick after his prison release.

In addition to the main franchise films, the series is spawning a spinoff titled The Continental. The show will debut on Starz and is set in the mid-1970s. It will focus on a young Winston Scott, who is played by legendary actor Ian McShane in the John Wick films. The Continental will tell the origins of Scott and the Continental, a hotel exclusively for the underground cabal of for-hire-assassins and crime syndicates. According to a description of the series from Deadline, the show will follow Scott as he plots to take control of the hotel, all while narrowly avoiding the bullets of some vicious paid gunmen. McShane will likely not appear in the series, but he could possibly turn up in a narration capacity.