Wick reveals the symbiosis of an actor and a franchise

New spin-off Ballerina’ was supposed to be a Keanu-free expansion of the John Wick universe. But it’s not that easy to separate a man and his onscreen character

- Adam White

When the screenwriter Derek Kolstad first began shopping John Wick around Hollywood in the early 2010s, it was titled Scorn, and only lightly resembled the pulpy neo-western it would eventually become. Wick himself was written as an elderly hitman taking revenge on the criminals who had murdered his equally elderly dog. His body count was low. He liked to talk.

It was only after Keanu Reeves expressed interest in the movie that Scorn became John Wick, and John Wick got Keanu-fied. Reams of the character’s dialogue were excised, all the better to help Reeves glide through the movie like a ghost. The old dog was transformed into a tiny puppy, all the better for Reeves to cradle it gently and adorably in his arms. And the body count grew high. Real high.

The resulting John Wick movies – four in total, plus a TV miniseries and now a big-screen spin-off starring Ana de Armas – became a $3bn-and-counting phenomenon. They rescued Reeves from a run of duds (among them 47 Ronin, Man of Tai Chi and the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still), and cemented the actor as our most sensitive action superstar – a man of few words but absolutely astounding high-kicks.

Surrounding him have been sublime world-building, dazzling practical stuntwork, and a huge amount of memorable set pieces. While many of Tom Cruise’s gravity-defying exploits in the recent Mission: Impossible movies tend to blur together, you will absolutely remember Wick speedily riding a horse through the streets of Manhattan, or using a library book as a weapon, or repeatedly tumbling down the steps of Paris’s Sacré Coeur. Now, though, the franchise faces an existential crisis as it looks into its future: what is John Wick without its leading man?

In Ballerina