John Wick Director Got Snubbed By Marvel
John Wick is one of the best action franchises in the world, and the director of the franchise revealed that he was snubbed by Marvel to direct a film.
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While Marvel movies like Captain America: Winter Solider and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings certainly leveled up the MCU’s fight choreography, it would be cool to see some John Wick-style gun-fu mixed into the traditional MCU formula. Apparently, this could have been a possibility for the upcoming Marvel Blade movie, as John Wick franchise director Chad Stahleski told Comicbook.com that he asked Kevin Fiege if he could head up the project. While this didn’t pan out, it does appear that Marvel is interested in letting Stahleski head up his own project at some point.
There’s precedent for Stahleski to take on the head job for an MCU movie. He’s put the work in as a second unit director for projects like Captain America: Civil War and in the stunt department for Iron Man 2, so he certainly knows how the Marvel machine operates. According to Stahleski, after John Wick 3, Kevin Fiege and he had a sit-down conversation about potential projects. While Stahleski had nothing but good things to say about Fiege, he did say that he might not fit the MCU studio mold. This certainly makes sense. While the MCU has its share of violence and fights, none of it quite reaches the level of hyper-violence seen in the John Wick films. That could certainly change after the MCU has its first R-rated project with the eventual Deadpool 3, but for now, it seems like they won’t want to go quite that far for Blade. Marvel ended up going with Bassam Tariq for the position instead, which Stahleski also praised in his interview.
While we might not see an MCU project from the John Wick director anytime soon, we will be getting the next entry to the Keanu Reeves-led franchise in the future. While the film was originally supposed to come out in 2021, the pandemic and other extenuating circumstances led to the release date being pushed to March 24, 2023. The end of John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum saw John Wick being separated from the assassin organization known as The High Table, with the organization thinking he’s dead after being shot off a rooftop. However, Wick is in the care of Laurence Fishburne’s Bowery King at the end of the movie. The fourth chapter will presumably pick up right after the events of this movie.
John Wick: Chapter 4 will see Chad Stahleski return to the directing chair with Michael Finch and Shay Hatten co-writing the script. Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Lance Reddick, and Ian McShane return with new cast members including Donnie Yen, Bill Skarsgard, Clancy Brown, Scott Adkins, Mark Zaror, Hiroyuki Sanada, Shamier Anderson, and Rina Sawayama. Meanwhile, you can catch Marvel’s Blade when it hits theaters on November 3, 2023. Blade will star Mahershala Ali in the titular role. For the next Marvel project, keep an eye out for the Disney+ series She-Hulk starring Tatiana Maslany in August and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever hitting theaters in November.
