__Spoilers for __John Wick: Chapter 4 below.**
The latest edition of the John Wick series has an air of finality to it. After three sequels of our favorite suited assassin fighting for his freedom from the High Table—the governing body of the international society of assassins that Wick’s a part of—he finally scores a victory … and dies in the process. And to put any speculation to rest, the final scene of Chapter 4 shows Wick’s allies, Winston (Ian McShane) and the Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne), appearing at his gravesite. Thousands of slain enemies and countless shootouts later, Wick finds peace alongside his wife Helen at long last.
But just because Wick is dead doesn’t mean it’s the last we’ll see of him. Reeves already filmed a cameo for the upcoming Ana De Armas-led spinoff Ballerina, which will focus on one of the dancers working for The Director (Anjelica Huston), who audiences last saw in Chapter 3. “I’m in it for a few sequences,” Reeves confirmed at Brazil’s CCXP last fall. The movie, he said at the time, is about a “woman who has some very difficult circumstances and who’s looking for revenge: “Someone killed her father. Who could that be? And so it’s her journey for actually understanding her past. She lost her father at a young age, and she doesn’t really know what happened. Only that someone came into the house and killed her father, who had a tattoo. And as we know in John Wick, if you have a tattoo, something’s going on.” (Ballerina takes place between the events of Chapters 3 and Chapter 4, which explains the Reeves cameo.)
Chapter 4 includes a post-credits sequence that picks back up with Wick’s frienemy Caine (Donnie Yen), now also free of the High Table, who is on the way to visit his daughter for the first time in years. As he approaches her, a woman emerges from the crowd, brandishing a knife. It’s Akira (Rina Sawayama) making good on her promise to kill Caine for murdering her father, Shimazu (Hiroyuki Sanada), who protected John earlier in the film. This could just be an addition to the series’ motif about inescapable cycles of vengeance—or it could be teasing a spin-off for Sawayama. With so much screentime devoted to Sawayama’s ass-kicking concierge, one could easily imagine her joining forces with de Armas’ character over a shared desire to avenge their fathers.
One question hovers over all of this: Will Wick franchise director Chad Stahelski actually allow his hero to stay dead forever? If there’s one thing even John Wick can’t kill, it’s Hollywood’s desire to tap a bankable franchise over and over.