Keanu fought to have the dog die in the first John Wick

Here’s a grim little action movie counterfactual: Would we have the current John Wick franchise if the first movie didn’t have the bit where Theon Greyjoy and his goons murder John Wick’s dog? It’s a shocking moment from the 2014 action flick, and one that’s left a bad taste in the mouths of more than a few moviegoers who would have been happy to see the film stick to nice, safe, enjoyable human death. (Something the franchise has pretty rigorously stuck to ever since, including the very good bit from John Wick 3 that is basically about letting the Canine World get revenge on the henchpeople of the world.) But does Wick’s subsequent rampage—and the escalating series of consequences that make up the ramshackle but enjoyable plots of the movie’s three follow-ups—make sense without that moment of animal brutality?

This, per a recent Business Insider interview with co-director David Leitch, commemorating the first film’s 10th anniversary this past week (and the upcoming release of spin-off film Ballerina, out next June). Leitch says he and his co-creators got a ton of pushback from the money folks over the decision to kill Wick’s puppy Daisy as the inciting incident for their film. Leitch: “We were told, ‘It’s bad luck.’ ‘It’s bad juju.’ ‘It’s Old Yeller, you can’t do this!’ ‘No one will want to see this on screen; you’re going to alienate the audience.” (Leitch also tries to make a point about the hypocrisy of caring so much more about an animal than the 76 people who die in the movie, although we’d argue that that’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the audience’s response to violence toward the innocent and helpless, as opposed to a bunch of gangsters and professional assassins.) Leitch says he had at least one major defender on his and co-director Chad Stahelski’s decision to stick to their pooch-punting guns: Keanu Reeves himself, who “stood up for us” when investors tried to pitch them on an ending where the dog survived.

We report thus mostly because it’s an amusing mental image for us: Reeves, a noted dog lover who reportedly bonded on the set with the pup (whose name was Andy, but who is apparently now called “Wick” by the family that ended up adopting him), advocating passionately for its fictional death. It’s not entirely surprising—Reeves hand-picked Leitch and Stahelski, his former Matrix stunt coordinators, to direct the movie, so he was always going to back them all the way—but he’s still not the first guy we’d think of when it comes to making a defense of artistic dog death.

[via Gamesradar]