Because John Wick is terrible at retiring (and because Chapter 2 left him in quite a sticky situation that whole worldwide bounty thing and all), director Chad Stahelski is already working on the script for a third movie, and he’s very excited about all the possibilities. Wick is not part of a franchise, so all the series really depends on is Keanu Reeves’ availability and the ability of the writers and director to come up with another idea.

Stahelski sat down with JoBlo recently and told them that, above all, he wants the next movie to be “different.”

I think, in my opinion the trapping would be to try and make it bigger. I can’t tell you whether John Wick Chapter 3 will be bigger or smaller, but hopefully it will be different and more fun, or more creative and different. I think originality suffers sometimes by going big or by size or quantity. Obviously you can see several franchises out there right now that if you just got rid of the title card, you can follow the movie just by closing your eyes and listening and going, I know what’s happening here. The building is crumbling. The earthquake is happening or the laser and the spaceship is coming down. We look at it as a challenge rather than a moneymaker. We look at it like, okay, John Wick did this and this and we did these kind of cool things as well. It’s our world which is the greatest part about it. It’s an original property. We don’t have to bend or fit into any preexisting ideas or mythology about what John Wick is. Can we be cooler? Can we come up with some different stuff? Can we show you a different aspect to the world? I think we’ve got some pretty good ideas. Again, I’ll let you know in about a year or so when Rotten Tomatoes skewers us [Laughing] but we’ll see what happens.

The world of the Wick movies is a densely detailed, ever-expanding underworld of assassins, thieves, and evil rich people, so he’s right that the possibilities of where to go from here really are endless. He also revealed to Collider that he’s already in the middle of writing the script for Chapter 3, and hopes to begin filming within the year.

Yeah — we’re currently in the middle of writing it right now.… It’s more of a how fast can we get our s--- together. But I would assume that if not by the end of this year, the beginning of next year.

Stahelski also assured that he wasn’t planning on filling the next movie with ridiculously huge explosions and action setpieces, which are fun, but not what John Wick is about.

We want, not so much to go bigger on the third one, but to show you more of the intricacies of the world… I feel like there are all these different subtleties that I skipped over in Number Two, that I’d like to go back to on [Chapter 3] and show you the inner workings of different parts of New York. So rather than massive set pieces, I’d like to show you cooler and more intricate ones… I think it would be a mistake budget wise and creatively to just go big and blow up a freeway. That’s not our gig. That’s a comic book or a Bond gig. We want to show you cool and intricate details. What are those little details in everyday life? Hopefully – we make people look at garbage collectors and cleaner vans and homeless people a little differently now.

He’s right — the details are exactly what make these movies so special, and Wick is definitely more of a dark, sneaky series than something like Fast & Furious.

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