The Keanu Reeves movie that accidentally ripped off another Keanu Reeves movie
While the John Wick films aren’t exactly the most original concept to have ever graced our screens, it’s clear that there’s an undeniable charm to how they approach the neo-noir genre in a modern fashion, with the success of the first spawning multiple sequels.
With Keanu Reeves as the titular character, he adds to his long history of reprising roles within movie franchises, having also delivered beloved turns in a trio of Bill & Ted films, as well as his outstanding performances as Neo in The Matrix trilogy.
Given his illustrious career, there was little chance of the original John Wick failing to perform at the box office, and although it’s hard to imagine how the writers have managed to squeeze a further three sequels and potentially more out of its plot, the franchise has become immensely popular as a result.
In the original film, Wick is out to exact revenge on the men who killed his pet dog, which was given to him by his recently deceased wife, who had been terminally ill. Already stricken by grief, Reeves’ character suddenly finds himself embroiled in a fiasco with New York’s Russian Mafia, and has to go to great lengths to find a resolution to his plight. In some senses, it’s classic action movie fare, but the way in which the extravagant plot unfolds over a dead dog seems like a totally unique concept that can’t possibly have been done before.
However, as it turns out, this wasn’t the first film in which Reeves has played a character who has received a dog as a gift from a woman suffering from a terminal illness, and in a rather unusual coincidence, it turns out that Bridget Moynahan, who plays Helen Wick in the 2014 thriller, had been beaten to the claim by Charlize Theron, who stars alongside Reeves in the 2001 film Sweet November, where she mails his character a dog.
Reeves’ character in this film isn’t yet aware that Theron’s character has succumbed to her illness when he receives the dog, but it would appear that when they were writing the film, John Wick co-creators David Leitch and Chad Stahelski were also unaware that this almost exact sequence of events had taken place 13 years before. When it was brought up in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter celebrating 10 years of the first John Wick film, they were shocked to find out that they’d unwittingly ripped off another film that shared the same lead actor.
“I never connected those dots. That’s so great,” claimed Leitch, while Stahelski was equally as stunned. “Funnily enough, I did not know that at the time,” he added. “After John Wick came out, I read something about it, and I was like, ‘Really? How did I not know that?’ So maybe we’ll go for three. You never know.”
According to Brian Davids, the interviewer for The Hollywood Reporter, he had previously brought up this same coincidence to Theron, and managed to shock her to the point that she messaged Reeves instantly to tell him about this bizarre occurrence. It’s clear that this escaped everyone involved in both projects that this had even happened, and as minor as it may seem, it’s amusing that John Wick was inadvertently based on a completely unrelated film that happened to have Reeves involved.
