Series director: John Wick 4's ending was influenced by Cowboy Bebop

This news will contain spoilers for John Wick 4 and Cowboy Bebop. Readers who have not seen them and are interested in watching them should be aware.

In a recent interview with Comic Book Movie, John Wick series director Chad Stachelski said that the classic animated series Cowboy Bebop provided inspiration for the death scene in the finale of John Wick 4.

He said in the interview: "One of my favorite anime, Cowboy Bebop, has Spike Spiegel die on the stairs. The creator and director of Cowboy Bebop, Hajime Yatate, has had a huge influence on me. So when I saw this location, everything made sense."

Hajime Yatate is actually the collective pseudonym of SUNRISE Project. As an original animation, Cowboy Bebop does not have an original author. Perhaps Stachelski does not know that Hajime Yatate is not a single person. The supervisor/director of Star Citizen is Shinichiro Watanabe.

"Cowboy Bebop" is one of the most classic works in the history of Japanese animation. It is set in space in 2021. It combines science fiction and westerns to tell the story of a group of bounty hunters. Spike is one of the protagonists of the animation. Interestingly, there are many tributes to classic Hollywood movies in this animation, and now many European and American movies are influenced by it.

Although the animation has many comedic elements and is not a completely serious work, the tone of "Cowboy Bebop" is a romantic tragedy. In the end, Spike fights his past and dies on the stairs. The dead lover, the cute dog and the confrontation with his past are very similar to the elements in "John Wick".

The director continued: "It probably took us quite a while, you know, we wrote back and forth for about a year before we finally finished the script, and I think we thought less than two months before shooting: 'Oh! This is what we want (the ending)!'"

"That was after I sent a group of location scouts to Paris and found the Sacre-Coeur. We loved the imagery of the church and what it meant to walk down the steps."