A John Wick anime movie is in the works – and it will be a prequel to the original film answering one of our biggest questions

John Wick: Chapter 4 — (Image credit: Lionsgate/Murray Close)

The world of John Wick is expanding. Well, more than it has done already, anyway...

The action-packed franchise, which sees Keanu Reeves play the titular hitman, has spawned four movies since it kicked off in 2014. Prime Video released spin-off series The Continental in 2023 and another film is on the way, centered on Ana de Armas' Ruska Roma assassin Eve Macarro. Now it's been revealed that a feature-length prequel is in the works, too.

It won't be live-action like the other projects, though; it's going to be an anime, according to director Chad Stahelski. "It's fun that it's in a different medium," the filmmaker told The Hollywood Reporter recently, confidently describing the new outing as "awesome".

"Some of the prequels and sequels that you see in other franchises, we're not meant to be built that way," he continued. "We just want to have fun. We want to have fun with the Wick world, but we've already capped it on one end [with John Wick: Chapter 4], so let's go back and use a different medium."

While Stahelski didn't say much about the focus of the movie, he did tease that it'll partly explore Wick's "impossible task", the mission that led to his retirement and him embracing a quieter life with his wife.

"You can explore things that we couldn't do in the features," he went on, explaining that it would felt "a little false" to have done a fifth, sixth, seventh movie in the main series. "We can be a little bit more crazy and nutty in the anime, and we can be a lot more explicit in our storytelling and world building on the TV show. So those are exciting to us without seeming repetitive, and that's where we're putting our energies right now."

I am an Entertainment Writer here at GamesRadar+, covering all things TV and film across our Total Film and SFX sections. Elsewhere, my words have been published by the likes of Digital Spy, SciFiNow, PinkNews, FANDOM, Radio Times, and Total Film magazine.