There’s been a lot of talk about the length of “John Wick: Chapter 4” — it’s 2 hours and 49 minutes. Just 6 minutes shy of “The Godfather.”
It doesn’t really merit that kind of epic length, but there’s a lot of good stuff within that 169 minute runtime. However, supposedly, the first cut of the film ran almost an hour longer and it didn’t work at all.
Chatting with IndieWire, director Chad Stahelski confirmed that “our first cut was 3 hours and 45 minutes”, and more tellingly, “it felt like 3 hours and 45 minutes. We were like, oh we’re so screwed”.
Imagine being editor Nathan Orloff and given the task of meticulously editing the film down by an hour, with all those fight sequences having to gel perfectly, frame by frame. It must have been a maddeningly exhausting process
Not just that, but with every few minutes that Orloff/Stahelski cut from the film, they had to rewatch it again from start to finish to make sure it all gelled properly.
Insanity.
Orloff talks about it more in the IndieWire piece. Stahelski adds that “even if we just took 30 seconds out of something, I’d make everybody watch the movie again… That’s the only way you know you have the right pace”.