John Wick is literally a man of few words. A report from The Wall Street Journal counted all the words Wick uttered throughout the film and he seemingly didn’t have a lot to say, but there was a whole lot to see.
The famous assassin says only 380 words across 103 lines of dialogue during “John Wick: Chapter 4,” which runs nearly three-hours long with its 169 minute runtime. Nearly a third of Reeves’ dialogue in the sequel consists of just one single word.
“In the first installment, clocking in at 101 minutes, Mr. Reeves said a total of 484 words,” WSJ reported. “With a run time of 169 minutes, the fourth movie pushes three hours but features just 380 words by Wick. About 10% of them are featured in the movie’s trailer, which makes the hero seem almost chatty; Wick says more in that 2.5 minute clip than he does in the first 25 minutes of the movie itself.”
John Wick’s limited dialogue is all by design. “John Wick: Chapter 4” director Chad Stahelski and Reeves “stripped out roughly half the dialogue written for his character in the initial script.” The scene in which John Wick and the villainous Marquis de Gramont (Bill Skarsgård) hash out the rules of their duel was scripted with Wick having 50% of the dialogue in the scene, for instance. Reeves cut out chunks of dialogu so that John Wick only has a few one-word responses in the scene, including “pistol” and “no quarter.”
The longest line of dialogue that Reeves has is in a scene with co-star Hiroyuki Sanada, who plays Shimazu Koji where Wick says, “You and I left a good life behind a long time ago, my friend.”
Despite the lack of dialogue, audiences are responding well to John Wick: Chapter 4 at the box office. The film opened to a franchise record of $73.5M with a global debut of $137.5M.
