John Wick 4's Original Title Almost Spoiled The Entire Movie

This article contains spoilers for "John Wick: Chapter 4."

John Wick didn't become this generation's pre-eminent action hero by dying, but it sure didn't hurt. Back in 2014, the character debuted in his first movie, which introduced Keanu Reeves as an aggrieved former hitman who sets out on a blood-drenched quest for revenge after the son of a crime boss breaks into his home and kills John's new puppy. That's enough to send anyone into a blind rage, but Reeves' character took his time, unearthing his weapons from beneath concrete in a sledgehammer scene that saw the actor take a surprisingly method approach, before tracking down everyone responsible for the poor pup's death. Only after this did he let his aggression out, laying waste to 77 people across the film's runtime, before finally offing Michael Nyqvist's Russian crime lord Viggo Tarasov in a satisfying conclusion that underlined the myth of John Wick in the public consciousness.

John Wick has increased in power with every subsequent entry in the franchise. Chad Stahelski, the director of every film in the main saga, has upped the body count for most of the sequels (it took a slight dip in "John Wick: Chapter 2"). But it's not just that the kills have increased and become more and more elaborate — Wick himself has basically become indestructible, to the point it lowers the stakes enough to, dare I say, make the films a tad boring?

That's not to say that the movies aren't impressive in terms of the action. The choreography reached impressive levels in 2023's "John Wick: Chapter 4," which featured one of the best action scenes ever filmed. Still, Reeves overcoming wave after wave of enemies and walking away ready to fight another day was becoming a bit tiresome by that point. Then, John Wick died in one of the series' most shocking moments that was almost given away by the film's original title.

The end of "John Wick: Chapter 4" sees the titular hitman face off against Caine (Donnie Yen) in a duel in which John is hit by two shots. After he manages to get off a final shot and kill the film's antagonist, Marquis Vincent de Gramont (Bill Skarsgård), he seemingly expires before a final scene depicts his gravestone placed next to his wife's. Ian McShane's Winston then bids him a farewell before walking away, seemingly confirming the death of Keanu Reeves' once-indestructible action hero.

It was hard to believe at the time that the character had actually died. After all, his invulnerability had become a central feature of the movies by that point. What's more, the studio behind the movies, Lionsgate, surely wasn't going to let one of its biggest franchises end when it was seemingly at the height of its powers. As it stands, however, John Wick is well and truly in the ground, and it seems that such a huge moment in the saga was almost spoiled ahead of time by the movie's own title.

Director Chad Stahelski has talked previously about how the ending of "John Wick: Chapter 4" was originally a lot less subtle, revealing that he shot an ending where audiences actually saw John at the end of the movie, confirming he was still alive. After test audiences preferred the ambiguous ending, however, the director opted for the version we all saw in the theaters, which certainly aligned more with Stahelski's guiding principle for "Chapter 4." The former stuntman explained how Wick's death was inspired by a treatise on samurai etiquette called "Hagakure," which essentially refers to the art of the way of dying. As he explained to Empire Magazine, the very first line he and Reeves wrote on a napkin in Japan was, "You can only have a good death if you had a good life." The two wrote the movie backwards from there. Initially, however, it seems that this idea of "Hagakure" actually made its way into the original title for "Chapter 4."

The "John Wick" movies began adding addendums to their titles with 2019's "John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum," and it seems the final chapter would have had its own addition had it also not been a massive spoiler. Chad Stahelski spoke to CinemaBlend and revealed that the original working title for "Chapter 4" was indeed "Hagakure." The director explained the phrase as referring to a 16th century book about "the code of ethics of samurai and how to prepare for dying; the way of dying kind of thing."

Given the age in which we live, where internet sleuths jump on every tidbit of information ahead of a movie's release, using such a phrase in the final title for "Chapter 4" surely would have given away the demise of Keanu Reeves' action hero. Still, Stahelski seemed to have a preference for maintaining "Hagakure" in the final title of the movie, telling the outlet, "We dug the title of it and stuff, but sometimes it ... it can translate different ways ... Even in Japanese terms, it kind of means like, 'hidden leaves.' There's mixed translations." Ultimately, he claimed there was a "group consensus" to stick with the more simple "Chapter 4," and mentioned that "Hagakure" might have given the film "too much of a samurai vibe," which is surprising given the aforementioned spoiler risks. Surely that was the biggest consideration?

Either way, despite John Wick seemingly having finally departed for the afterlife, there has been much talk of what Stahelski and Reeves will do in the officially announced "John Wick: Chapter 5." But the box office opening for spin-off "Ballerina" might just have been a real death sentence for the franchise as a whole. Nobody, it seems, is interested in the world of John Wick without the man himself, as further evidenced by the lifeless, joyless TV spin-off "The Continental." Perhaps "Chapter 4" really did bring about the death of John Wick — though, in Hollywood, such a thing is as ambiguous as the translation of Hagakure itself.