John Wick 4 Director Defends The Movie's Nearly 3-Hour Runtime

gamerant.com:

John Wick: Chapter 4 director Chad Stahelski and editor Nathan Orloff have addressed the film’s runtime, which clocks in at over three hours.

The fourth installment in the action franchise, John Wick: Chapter 4 will see Keanu Reeves fighting his way around the world to escape the violent life of an assassin. New characters like Donnie Yen's Caine and Bill Skarsgård's Marquis Vincent de Gramont will join familiar fan favorites like Laurence Fishburne's Bowery King, Ian McShane's Winston Scott, and the late Lance Reddick's Charon to aid and challenge John on his journey. Trailers for the movie promised impressive action set pieces that were bigger and better than the franchise's previous entries. Given the action-packed trailers, fans were more daunted than surprised when the John Wick 4 runtime was announced.

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According to Stahelski and Orloff, the John Wick: Chapter 4 runtime was originally even longer. «Our first cut was three hours and forty-five minutes, and it felt like three hours and forty-five minutes. We were like, oh, we’re so screwed,» Stahelski revealed in an interview with IndieWire. The director said that the nearly four-hour-long cut included all of the side characters' stories taken into account and fully serviced. John Wick: Chapter 4 doesn't simply expand the world John exists in — it expands the network he operates in. After composing the initial cut, Stahelski and Orloff were tasked with fine-tuning the story and balancing the characters' plot lines with John's. «I wanted to make sure that he was still the center of the universe,» Orloff said, «That everything always led back to him even though we were cutting away