New York - Keanu Reeves, now pushing 52, is a hot commodity again. Yes,
2017 just got that much stranger.
John Wick: Chapter 2, the latest vehicle for the 1990s
heartthrob, garnered an estimated $30 million in domestic ticket sales in its
first weekend. That’s more than double the amount raked in by the first film,
and the fourth best debut of the year. (The movie took in an additional
$10.6 million in international markets.)
Reeves, one of the most volatile assets in Hollywood, isn’t
known as the best of actors, and has certainly had some stinkers over the
years. For every Matrix, there’s a Johnny Mnemonic, for every Speed, a Sweet
November. Most recently, Reeves headlined 47 Ronin, an opulent martial arts
spectacle that flopped about as hard as a movie can.
In short, Reeves is a genuine movie star, but a streaky one.
Of his major films, the correlation between box-office revenue and critical
score on Rotten Tomatoes, which aggregates reviews, is an anemic .5. Which is
to say, some of his most lucrative movies are also some of his most panned
projects.
However, Reeves finally appears to have found his groove.
The two John Wick films are among the most-praised pieces of his career. To be
sure, there isn’t much to these movies: The special effects are minimal and the
plot spartan: a slighted thug kills someone’s dog and steals his car … the
wrong someone, it turns out.
The action, however, is constant. The cinematography is sharp,
and the stunts are sublime. If The Avengers is the action film equivalent of a
poetry slam, the Wick films are haiku. They are everything a would-be
blockbuster like 47 Ronin is not. Most importantly, they weren’t that expensive
to make—the Hollywood equivalent of a value stock.
Lions Gate Entertainment picked up distribution rights for
the first Wick film just 11 weeks before its debut. With a slight marketing
nudge, it became a very profitable asset, garnering a respectable $44 million
in domestic theaters before making a particularly strong run on digital
streaming platforms.
“You think ’What’s the big franchise that comes after Hunger
Games and Divergent?’ Guess what, it’s John Wick,” said comScore analyst
Paul Dergarabedian. “It’s a profit-making machine and a movie studio’s dream.”
Lions Gate CEO Jon Feltheimer said the Wick films land in a
financial sweet spot for his studio and Hollywood at-large. On a recent
conference call with analysts, he said the sequel illustrates “the
sustainability of a film model that allows us to create breakout hits without
swinging for the fences.”
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If stripped down, stylized fare is the bullseye of the movie
industry, Reeves is the movie-star of the moment. He’s far from his Johnny Utah
prime, but as such, he doesn’t require a Dwayne "Rock” Johnson sized
paycheck. What’s more, he’s still a household name. the best parts of his
instrument are one full display in Wick: a simmering stoicism and one-liners
wooden enough to be both dark and funny.
“It’s a man of few words kicking ass and taking names—almost
like Arnold Schwarzenegger in the original Terminator,” Dergarabedian said. “I
can’t think of another star that can pull this off the way Keanu Reeves does.”
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