How long is John Wick 4's runtime? (2024)

Spare a thought for poor old hitman John Wick – not only does the amount of bad guys he has to kill increase with each movie, but he also has to spend more time and energy despatching them as each John Wick movie is longer than the previous one, with Chapter 4 boasting the longest running time of all.

Back in 2014, the original John Wick was an almost fleeting 101 minutes long, while John Wick: Chapter 2 was just over the two hour mark and John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum came in a few minutes longer at 130 minutes.

The latest gun-blasting thriller surpasses all of those and comes in at an epic 169 minutes (that’s a blood-soaked two hours and 49 minutes of shooting, killing, fighting and punching), but not a minute of that running time is wasted.

“I don’t think we’ve ever concerned ourselves, we just watch the movie,” director Chad Stahelski told Digital Spy when asked about the movie’s runtime. “I think it’s the length that we feel is the best version of the movie. We’ve tried longer, we’ve tried much shorter. That’s what we feel is a good movie.”

One reason for the long runtime is that Stahelski planned for it to be a different style of movie from the first three. “Chad said that it was going to be more of an ensemble movie, where you’re toggling between different stories,” the movie’s editor, Nathan Orloff, explained in an interview with IndieWire.

“To be really honest with you, zero was planned out,” Stahelski told IndieWire. “Our 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.”

Orloff and Stahelski cut the movie back – “I went through a pass where anytime someone repeated an idea they had already expressed, I cut it out,” explained Orloff – but made sure they didn’t sacrifice any of the film’s 14 action sequences.

Their approach definitely worked, with the fourth instalment of the John Wick franchise winning rave reactions from fans and critics alike since its release on March 24.

The question once you’ve seen the epic movie is, of course, whether we might get another (even longer?) John Wick movie, especially as the ending can be interpreted as ambiguous, leaving open the possibility of another sequel.

Originally, a fifth movie was planned to be filmed back to back with Chapter 4, but at present there are no immediate plans for a follow-up.

There is a prequel miniseries, The Continental, coming later this year, with Colin Woodell as a younger version of John’s friend Winston (played by Ian McShane in the movies), and McShane will return to his role as the older Winston in spin-off movie Ballerina, starring Ana de Armas as an assassin seeking revenge.

As for the possibility of John Wick: Chapter 5, Keanu Reeves told Total Film in an interview earlier this year that it will depend on the success of the current epic instalment.

“You have to see how the audience responds to what we did. The only reason we’ve had a chance to make these movies is that people have liked what we have done. So I think we have to wait and see how the audience responds to it. Hopefully they’ll like it.”

John Wick: Chapter 4 is out now in cinemas.