Lionsgate's action-packed John Wick 4 was initially almost four hour long before its director and editors cut it down to a final runtime 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 it felt like three hours and 45 minutes.
"We were like, 'oh, we're so screwed'," they added. The increased runtime came from world building, though a lot of this was obviously left on the cutting room floor as the film was edited over and over again.
The process wasn't easy, however, as Stahelski and Orloff struggled to maintain good pacing throughout John Wick: Chapter 4 as they stripped such significant chunks of the film.
But it took a long time for other reasons too, "because even if we just took 30 seconds out of something, I'd make everybody watch the movie again," Stahelski said, joking that his editorial staff probably hated him.
The process seemingly worked, as IGN awarded the film a 10/10 in our review. "John Wick: Chapter 4 stands above its predecessors — and the past decade's worth of action films as a whole — as a modern epic, something Keanu Reeves and Chad Stahelski have been driving at since 2014."
Hi Luis Joshua Gutierrez is a freelance writer who loves games. You can reach him at @ImLuisGutierrez on Twitter.
source https://www.ign.com/articles/john-wick-chapter-4-was-originally-almost-four-hours-long