The following contains spoilers for John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum.
The newest installment of the John Wick franchise once again puts the title character through hell. He's set upon by another army of assassins trying to kill him and he must fight them off almost entirely alone, and while Wick has proven resilient, he hasn't made it this far without some scars. However, the biggest injury John Wick has yet sustained comes in John Wick Chapter 3 - Parabellum, and it's an injury that caused problems not just for the character, but also the production of the movie itself.
Without diving too deep into spoiler territory, John Wick sustains a serious injury to his left hand, one that required the use of CGI in order to recreate the damage any time you saw Keanu Reeves left hand throughout the rest of the movie.
The problem is that Keanu Reeves is left-handed, which meant that a not insignificant amount of money was going to need to be spent on CGI for the new movie because you were going to be seeing that hand a lot. According to director Chad Stahelski...
No one creatively saw a problem with it, but it comes down to a simple matter of financials. Without giving away the spoiler, you saw it; you know what he does. That’s on his lead hand. You have a left-handed actor who’s just deformed his left hand and that left hand is in every shot of the third act of the movie. VFX wise, there’s a cost associated with that. There’s logistical problems and practical filming that are associated with that. The studio does their job of questioning my visions and my methods to see if I really like it
It seems that Lionsgate, the studio behind the John Wick franchise, had to at least ask the director if this decision was really a necessary one. While it was understood from a story perspective, movies are a commercial venture after all, and so cost is always going to be a concern. According to THR, The director apparently had to make concessions in the budget in other places in order to make sure the money was there to handle the CGI costs.
For whatever it's worth, odds are that the studio probably doesn't mind the additional CGI costs as much right now. John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum had the biggest opening in the franchise history this past weekend, and a fourth film has already been green lit. Of course, most of John Wick: Chapter 4 is going to be that much more expensive because the injury in question won't be healing in the next movie, so the next film will need to use CGI for the entire run.
John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum is in theaters now.
