On the heels of Lionsgate’s explosive box office success for action thriller John Wick: Chapter 4, consumer appeal for home entertainment access to the movie franchise — starring Keanu Reeves as a former hitman who returns to the trade after his pet dog is murdered — is on overdrive.
NBCUniversal-owned Vudu platform cited the original 2014 John Wick, John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017) and 2019’s John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum among the platform’s top-selling/renting weekly titles. The movies are priced from $3.99 for digital rental.
Redbox offers all three titles for rent on DVD for $2.25, in addition to the aforementioned digital rental fees. The platform is also offering a “John Wick Triple Feature” transactional VOD bundle featuring all three movies for $19.99.
The original John Wick ranked No. 10 on Reelgood’s weekly streaming chart through March 16. The chart tracks real-time data from 5 million platform users living in the United States across SVOD and AVOD services for original and acquired streaming programs and movies.
The three movies are also available to stream on NBCUniversal’s Peacock platform, Sling TV and Fubo, which all require a subscription.
Retailers, meanwhile, are offering various exclusive “John Wick” movie sets featuring extras such as player cards and discounts on a ticket to John Wick 4.
The box office success of John Wick 4 suggests the home entertainment window of the franchise won’t close anytime soon.
“When you make a fourth in an action franchise, you have to expect it to go down. That is the nature of these franchises,” Joe Drake, chairman of Lionsgate Motion Picture Group, told the Washington Post. “But we kept seeing signals, and it was wonderful to see the movie they delivered. We saw the audience wanting more.”
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The franchise has spawned a movie spin-off co-starring Oscar-nominated Ana de Armas (Blonde) and Reeves, with Prime Video set to debut a prequel series, “The Continental,” starring Mel Gibson.
Drake said the physicality of making the movies is taking its toll on the 58-year-old Reeves, who reportedly declares each new “Wick” movie his last due to the physical demands.
“As best they can, [the producers] will continue to try to seduce Keanu to come back and do things,” Drake told the Post. “So, we’re going to continue to look for ways to meet that demand.”
Directed by Gregory Monro (Sean Connery vs James Bond) and produced by Martin Laurent (Mahatma Gandhi: Beyond the Myth) and Jérémy Zelnick (The Vanished President, Brad Pitt: More Than a Pretty Face), Kubrick by Kubrick is a rare journey into the life and films of the legendary director Stanley Kubrick, featuring a trove of unearthed interview recordings from the master himself. Twenty-one years after his death, fans of the 2001: A Space Odyssey director and cinema genius can hear his thoughtful takes on his craft and the paradoxes of human nature in a documentary built upon four wide-ranging audio interviews with French critic Michel Ciment with the support of the Stanley Kubrick Film Archive.
The film features the voices of John Krasinski (TV’s “The Office,” A Quiet Place), Emily Blunt (A Quiet Place), Danny DeVito (Batman Returns), Ian McKellen (“The Lord of the Rings” franchise), Sylvester Stallone (“Rocky” franchise) and Raven-Symoné.
