Donnie Yen might direct his own John Wick spin-off

While we’d argue that John Wick: Chapter 4 was an extremely fun movie in its own right—we could watch that poor bastard fall down those stairs, or light people up with his fire shotgun, all damn day—it’s also impossible to deny that the 2023 film was a sort of fast-paced pitch deck for potential Wick spin-offs. Shamier Anderson and Rina Sawayama both got ample opportunities to show off their potential talents as future franchise leads—a possible necessity, given the current state of Keanu Reeves’ knees—but nobody got a better showcase than Donnie Yen. The Ip Man star, who played blind badass Caine in the film, has already lined up his own movie spin-off set in the Wickiverse, and now it sounds like he might be moving behind the camera, too.

This is per a conversation Yen recently had with Collider, in which he revealed that he was in talks to potentially direct the Caine film, which was formally announced back in May 2024. Yen is a veteran director in his native China, although he’s never helmed a Hollywood production. (In fact, he made his comments while promoting his latest directing effort, The Prosecutor, in which he also stars as a cop-turned-prosecutor who still seems to wind up kicking an enormous number of people.) Asked about rumors that Wick mastermind Chad Stahelski had been floating the idea of Yen taking over directing duties on the movie, Yen confirmed, “It is true. I think both the fans, as well as the studio, want this to happen, and we’ll see. I don’t know… I can only tell you that much. But yes, we are talking, and we are talking intimately. We’ll see what happens.”

We’d argue that the Wick movies desperately need to find directors who can match Stahelski, whose razor sharp sense of framing, place, and speed are just as responsible for the franchise’s success as Reeves’ stoicism, or the movies’ over-the-top setpieces. Stahelski has been branching out into films that are not about hitmen being very sad about dog murder—he’s on the hook for a Highlander movie that’s supposed to start filming later this year with Henry Cavill—and so some fresh blood is required. Underworld‘s Len Wiseman is tackling the first big Wick spin-off, this June’s Ballerina, but there’s no modern action franchise we can think of where picking the right stable of new directors will be so key to its continuing success.