John Wick 3 Is Happening, 2019 Release Date Confirmed

Reluctant hitman John Wick is heading back to screens. It has been confirmed that John Wick: Chapter 3 will hit theaters in 2019, with Keanu Reeves returning in the lead role.

Lionsgate has announced that the movie will debut on May 17, 2019. This is the first time that a film in the action franchise has premiered in the summer, which shows the increasing popularity of the series. While the first movie made a modest $88 million worldwide, this year's John Wick: Chapter 2 has earned more than $171 million.

John Wick director Chad Stahelski first spoke about a potential third movie in May. He said: "We're currently in the middle of writing it right now. It's more [about] how fast can we get our s**t together. But I would assume that if not by the end of this year, [filming will start by] the beginning of next year."

Stahelski also hinted at what fans could expect from John Wick: Chapter 3 in terms of the movie's scale."We want, not so much to go bigger on the third one, but to show you more of the intricacies of the world," he said. "I feel like there are all these different subtleties that I skipped over in part 2, that I’d like to go back to [with part 3] and show you the inner workings of different parts of New York.

A John Wick TV show is also in development. In June, Stahelski revealed that the working title is The Continental, named after the series' chain of hitman-friendly hotels. "It's very tied to the film [in that] it's about the Continentals all over the world, how certain people come into that world, and what happens in relation to those people," he said. "I think the world is very vast. It's something that studio seems very, very intent on [making] and very, very behind."