CinemaCon 2025 - Lionsgate

Concerns about becoming "the 24/7 John Wick Channel" notwithstanding, the most major of minis offered a handful of promising "not quite a franchise" programmers.

Okay, when they say, “John Wick Chapter 5 is in development,” that’s very different from saying, “We figured out how to do it without nullifying both the whole “John Dies At the End” finale of John Wick: Chapter 4 and the “everything on the table because this is the end” feeling of that jaw-dropping modern classic” and “John Wick 5 is coming on, I dunno, March of 2027.”

But even with Keanu Reeves gently mocking the notion just a few weeks ago, I won’t pretend not to roll my eyes at the idea of potentially beating a dead horse. But that’s not all. Yes, we’re getting Ballerina in June (whose most recent trailer tried to position it as a quasi-John Wick 3.5) and the already-announced Donnie Yen-directed and Donnie Yen-starring Caine spin-off. 

Fine, Ballerina looks solid. The brief pub skirmish was engrossing and clever, and I’d advise them to offer it (perhaps in a slightly tweaked PG-13 form) before Imax prints of Thunderbolts and Mission: Impossible- The Final Reckoning. I’ll assume John Wick isn’t in the film *that* much, although I’ll note that Reeves’s performance seems oddly unnatural, akin to Robert Englund trying too hard to impersonate his prior performances in Freddy Vs. Jason, but we’ll see. 

Donnie Yen actioner with a Hollywood budget is a “special unto itself” proposition. But another John Wick? What’s next, a John Wick cartoon? Wait, what?! Dammit. Yup, we’re getting an animated prequel (with Reeves voicing) detailing the “origin story” of how Wick accomplished the impossible missions that allowed him to retire. (Laughs in Solo, Furiosa, and Transformers One.) Shannon Tindle (storyboard artist on Kubo and the Two Strings and director of Ultraman: Rising) will direct, with Vanessa Taylor penning the screenplay.

The good news is that she co-wrote The Shape of Water with Guillermo del Toro. The bad news is that she wrote Uglies, Divergent, and Hillbilly Elegy. Okay, so she is (alongside Brian Grazer, Ron Howard, and Ted Sarandos) among those indirectly responsible for the end of American democracy, but Everwood was good. Jokes aside, I’ll assume that this will be as visually interesting as Into the Spider-Verse and Mutant Mayhem. There’s a part of me that now wants a kid-friendly John Wick cartoon, like we used to get in the 1980s.