John Wick Screenwriter Derek Kolstad Wants John Wick 5 To Be “Smaller”
“I kind of want to see the fifth one...be more of him riding off into the sunset.
How do you bring John Wick back from the dead?
It’s a question that John Wick director Chad Stahelski and his Chapter 4 co-writer Mike Finch will have to contend with now that John Wick 5 has been confirmed. But Derek Kolstad, who wrote John Wick and its two succeeding sequels (though he emphasizes to Inverse that he is not involved in Chapter 5) doesn’t think that it will be that much of a hurdle for the fifth film. “He did die offscreen in that last one,” Kolstad tells Inverse. “So of course you're going to bring him back.”
Kolstad helped create the John Wick franchise, after his spec script Scorn was picked up by film producer Basil Iwanyk in 2013. Keanu Reeves and co-directors Chad Stahelski and David Leitch soon boarded the project, and the rest was history. After penning Chapter 2 and Chapter 3, Kolstad left to launch other action-thriller projects, including the Bob Odenkirk-led Nobody and the upcoming Normal, but he always has a fondness for the John Wick films, much like Reeves, who will be reprising his role as the constantly-besieged assassin once again. “Keanu's not a guy who likes sequels or franchises,” Kolstad says. “But he just loves John, and it's my grandpa's name, and I'm glad he does.”
Derek Kolstad with John Wick stars Laurence Fishburne, Keanu Reeves and producer Basil Iwanyk.
Though in the months since that announcement, Stahelski has appeared increasingly reluctant to give any updates on John Wick 5, Kolstad has a few suggestions for where the film could take Reeves’ assassin. “I think sequels got bigger and bigger and bigger,” Kolstad says. “I kind of want to see the fifth one be a little bit smaller, and be more of him riding off into the sunset.”
The fourth film somewhat offered that, with Wick’s allies gathering at his grave to bid him goodbye, though it was left purposefully ambiguous as to whether he was really dead. Maybe that grave was just a way for John Wick to finally escape the assassin world. Or maybe, per a prevailing fan theory, he’s been dead the whole time.
When I ask Kolstad what he thought of the theory that the John Wick movies took place in hell or some mythical underworld, he attributes it to the name he gave Lance Reddick’s character, Charon, the name of the ferryman to the Greek underworld. “We played around with sowing those seeds,” Kolstad says coyly.
But Kolstad found some parallels between that popular John Wick theory and his newest film, Normal, an actioner directed by Ben Wheatley starring Odenkirk as a sheriff who gets caught in a town-wide shootout. “The thing we found surprising is when Magnolia showed Normal to the AMC execs, two of them came up, and they're like, ‘It's The Odyssey,’” he says.
Ben Wheatley stars as Sheriff Ulysses in Normal.
Apart from some potential mythological parallels, Normal is a marked shift from Kolstad’s other assassin thrillers — namely, the protagonist is not an assassin. Odenkirk’s Sheriff Ulysses (there’s The Odyssey nod) is just a regular man caught in the wrong place, and forced to rely on his own devices to survive the night after an entire gun-toting town sets its sights on him. Perhaps for that reason, he doesn’t foresee Normal becoming a franchise like John Wick and Nobody, though never say never.
“If Normal lives in the one entry and people embrace it, I'm very proud and would be happy that it was just one,” Kolstad says. “But I have the next four in my head because I always think that way. And if they happen, I can't wait to revisit that world, but more importantly, do it with these people.”
