Lionsgate’s action-packed John Wick 4 was originally nearly four hours long before its director and editors cut it to a final running time of two hours and forty-nine minutes.
Director Chad Stahelski and editor Nathan Orloff told IndieWire that the “first cut was three hours and 45 minutes and felt like three hours and 45 minutes.
“We were like, ‘Oh, we’re so screwed,'” they added. The increased running time came from the world building, although much of it obviously remained on the cutting room floor as the film was edited over and over again.
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The process wasn’t easy, however, as Stahelski and Orloff struggled to maintain a good pacing throughout John Wick: Chapter 4 as they removed such significant portions of the film.
But it also took a long time for other reasons, “because even if we took just 30 seconds out of something, I would make everyone watch the film again,” Stahelski said, joking that his editors probably hated him.
The process seemed to be working, as IGN gave the film a 10/10 in our review. “John Wick: Chapter 4 rises above its predecessors – and the action movies of the past decade as a whole – as a modern epic, something Keanu Reeves and Chad Stahelski have been pushing since 2014.”
Hello Luis Joshua Gutierrez is a freelance writer who loves games. You can reach him at @ImLuisGutierrez on Twitter.