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Culture Shock: Everything You Need To Know About ‘John Wick’

John Wick has become one of the most celebrated action movies of the decade, thanks to its stylish fight scenes, intriguing characters, and rich world of eccentric bounty hunters and assassins. The third installment in the franchise was announced early this year, and there’s never been a better time to immerse yourself in these wildly entertaining movies. Here’s everything you need to know about John Wick.


1. The assassin sanctuary the Continental Hotel’s cardinal rule is that you can’t kill anyone on its premises. The filmmakers based this rule on the real-life Holiday Inn rule wherein if you throw up in the communal jacuzzi, you have to immediately leave the hotel without getting any of your luggage back.

2. Keanu Reeves learned how to speak Dutch to play the role of John Wick, and nobody had the heart to tell him that it wasn’t necessary, but now he speaks great Dutch.

3. To film convincing fight sequences, directors Chad Stahelski and David Leitch tell Keanu Reeves before every take that everyone in the scene is responsible for JonBenét Ramsey’s death.

4. John Wick’s archnemesis in John Wick is heart disease, the silent killer.

5. Humphrey Bogart was originally supposed to play John Wick, but he died 56 years before shooting started.

6. The movie went drastically over budget because Keanu Reeves kept taking apart the cameras in between shots so he could figure out how they worked.

7. The scene in which Keanu Reeves tries to drink a glass of water and chokes really bad and slams his life alert so hard that he knocks the wind out of himself was completely improvised. It’s incredible acting choices like that that show Keanu Reeves is more than a handsome face. He’s a bona fide action star.

8. The idea to have an entire underground society of assassins with its own rules, currency, and designated zones of neutrality was inspired by Chuck E. Cheese’s.