Right now, at the worldwide box office, audiences are seeing the Magnum Opus of one “Mr. John Wick,” as John Wick Chapter 4 has been released in theaters and was the No.1 film at the box office this past weekend. The film served many purposes, many that we won’t spoil, but one we will spoil is the epic fight scenes that you’ll see in the production. The team crafted arguably the greatest action movie of recent times, and every fight scene is unique. But if you want to know where they inspired some of them, you need only look at video games.
In the fight scene in question, John Wick is trying to get to a location and is forced to fight through a building full of people trying to kill him. In one sequence of this fight, we get a top-down view of the “battlefield” and watch as John blasts through the enemies with incredible power and precision. Some felt that the way it was framed looked like a reference to Hotline Miami. But according to director Chad Stahelski, it was a different game that gave him the “creative fire” to make this fight scene work in John Wick Chapter 4:
“If you’re ever lacking creativity, handcuff yourself and then figure it out, because then you’ll do something you haven’t done before,” said Stahelski, as noted by ComicBook.com. “So top shots were never very cool with us, with lighting or choreography, because it gets old quick. But I had seen this video game and I’ll throw a shout-out – I think it was called “Hong Kong Massacre” – they did this top shot and we had been doing so much with the big muzzle flashes and it just kind of clicked like, “Well, if I’m above, we shoot like this and we shoot like this, and it draws these cool lines with the muzzle flash, and if I get the right flicker effect, it’s like Etch A Sketch. It looks really cool.” And it was a different way to amp up the action and keep you in that video game mode that John Wick’s kind of known for, that first-person shooter kind of thing.”
The fight scene was incredible and a highlight of the movie. If you want to see some video game footage from the title in question, here you go:
It’s always cool for video games to get their due, and that’s precisely what happened here. Perhaps other action movies should take reference from video games.