Keanu Reeves‘s adventures as the international assassin are set to continue with the upcoming John Wick 4, and we’ve got some good news: the action movie is still going to have dogs.
Reeves’s time as John Wick began back in 2014 with action thriller movie simply titled John Wick. It performed well with a modest budget, justifying a second outing for the character. John Wick: Chapter 2 performed even better, while the third movie in the series continued that upward trend in commercial and critical success.
One of the most memorable aspects of the series is the focus on dogs, and John Wick’s relationship with canines. In the first John Wick, the movie villains killed John Wick’s dog triggering his rampant quest for revenge. Since then, Wick has had a four legged companion with him on his journeys.
Now, Chad Stahelski who is the director of John Wick 4 has shared how the action thriller movie will continue to shine a lot on dogs. Speaking to Collider, he said “Well, the [new] character of the dog is a her, but we had, let’s see, three females and two male dogs to comp all one dog together, depending on what the stunt, or the gag, or the acting bit was. This time we learned a lot from last time, but we wanted a little bit more out of this one in specialty stuff.”
Stahelski continued, talking about how the stunt dogs were trained. He said “We had the dog, I think it was just over five months, to work with cast and on stunts. It’s just when you’re bringing in the stunt teams, and we have different stunt teams on this one because it’s so much bigger, the dog is just like friends. You have to get to know your friends. So in order for the dog to be very playful, and safe, and have the confidence just like a human would, they have to spend time with each individual stunt guy. So we had to rotate every hour. One of our 10 main stunt team guys would go and play. That was his job. He had to go play with the dogs, and get tackled by the dogs, and play Frisbee with the dog. So you get acclimated to our canine friend and then that’s how we started working it.”
All the hard work put into the stunt dogs suggests that John Wick 4 could see the most dog-related action in the entire franchise so far. That’s great, and is bound to be a lot of fun. We just hope they all stay alive, because we can’t deal with the trauma of another John Wick dog death. For more thrilling action movies, check out our guides to The Gray Man 2, and Equalizer 3.