Remembering The Moment We Met John Wick On The Six-Year Anniversary Of The Film's Release

Lionsgate Studios

Back in 2014, I was in my senior year at Rutgers University. Life, through its almost overwhelming simplicity, was great. My college years were coming to a close and my future was beginning to take shape. I found myself in a sort of purgatory between two phases of life, as my “education” (folks, I didn’t learn anything in college except for how to survive) had yet to end but my professional life had yet to begin. As a result of this generally lackadaisical lifestyle, I had tons of free time on my hand that year which was largely spent catching $5 movies at the campus theater before spending the evenings mixing Jaegermiester and Natty Lite.

The reason that I mention the tail-end of my college years is that I remember, quite specifically, the release of John Wick, and the reason I remember so distinctly is because of how vehemently wrong I was about the project. At the time, Keanu Reeves had been lost in the Hollywood wilderness since the release of The Matrix Revolutions in 2003, spending the subsequent years starring in nondescript projects such as Constantine (which I actually low-key love), The Lake House (a melodrama with Sandy Bullock), Street Kings, and The Day The Earth Stood Still.

By the time John Wick rolled around, Reeves hadn’t starred in a notable film in close to a decade, which gave me the understandable inkling that this guy was washed, that his time as an A-lister was done, and that no one was asking for a new Reeves action franchise. Boy, how wrong I was.

On this day in 2014, JOHN WICK hit theaters 🍿

Legend. pic.twitter.com/hHMXVBjSaf

— Post Cred Pod (@PostCredPod) October 24, 2020

Not only did John Wick turn out to be an incredible and refreshing action film amongst the evergrowing landscape of comic book movies, but the project would go on to explode into one of the biggest franchises in recent years: three Wick movies have been released with a fourth and fifth on the way, in addition to a TV series centered around “The Continental”, the beloved assassin hotel that features heavily in the films. In fact, these days — six years after the film’s original release — it could be argued that John Wick is the most-successful action Hollywood franchise (that doesn’t include a cape).

So, in celebration of John Wick’s sixth anniversary, we thought it’d be fun to throw it back to the moment we all really met Baba Yaga and realized that this new Keanu Reeves assassin franchise was going to be something special: the first fight scene.