The John Wick movies have always lived by video game rules
Hollywood has gotten hot for video games in 2023, with live-action television adaptations of The Last of Us and Twisted Metal debuting on major streaming services and the animated Super Mario Bros. Movie banking over $1 billion in theaters. Hell, there was even a movie about Tetris this year.
And yet, few direct adaptations of video game properties preserve the bizarre and specific ways video game worlds differ from our own, or how the psychology of playing through a story differs from that of watching one. For that, you often need to look at films that are not specifically based on video games, but are inspired by their form or aesthetic.
That inspiration may be obvious, as in the pixels and power-ups of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, or subtextual, as in the grinding repetition of Edge of Tomorrow. As the generations who grew up with games as part of their regular narrative diet become filmmakers, the influence of video games becomes so pervasive it may not even be a conscious creative decision. Throughout behind-the-scenes featurettes included with its home video release, John Wick screenwriter Derek Kolstad describes his intention to build a pulpy comic book world of gangsters and assassins. Whether he meant to or not, what he actually created was cinema’s most perfect representation of a video game world, a surreal space governed by a set of clear, often unspoken rules.
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The John Wick series follows the eponymous hitman (Keanu Reeves) as he’s drawn out of retirement by the senseless killing of his beloved dog, a parting gift from his late wife, Helen. John himself is a textbook video game player character, a man of few words and little emotional growth but incredible, superhuman skill and a single, iconic
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