Keanu Reeves is signed to play the Baba Yaga again, and this time all he has to bring is the voice!
John Wick is officially going animated! According to Deadline, Lionsgate has greenlit the prequel, and ActionNewz has the breakdown of the new writing team.
Lionsgate CEO Jon Feltheimer brought it up during the company's November 5th earnings call: "we've begun preproduction on the John Wick animated prequel, returning Keanu Reeves to his iconic role."
For longtime animation fans, the name Shannon Tindle may ring a bell, and he's directing this one! He won an Emmy back in 2006 for his work on Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, then shared the story credit on Kubo and the Two Strings, the 2016 LAIKA movie that landed Oscar nominations for Best Animated Feature and Best Visual Effects. His feature directing debut came in 2024 with Ultraman: Rising on Netflix, animated by Industrial Light & Magic and nominated for Best Feature at the Annies.
So he's going from a baseball star raising a baby kaiju to a hitman wiping out his enemies in one night. That's quite a jump!
Then again, Tindle pitched Kubo as a stop-motion samurai epic, so sword fights are nothing new for him.
The credited writers have changed since Lionsgate unveiled the project at CinemaCon in April 2025. Vanessa Taylor (The Shape of Water) was the announced writer back then. AWN now credits Ryan and Kaz Firpo, and The Playlist says they're replacing her. They're best known for Eternals.
Reeves himself is producing with 87Eleven's Chad Stahelski and Thunder Road's Basil Iwanyk and Erica Lee, with Nathan Kahane as an executive producer. The new addition is Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg's Point Grey, the team behind Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, Invincible and Sausage Party, the R-rated comedy.
Could this one be R-rated too? Lionsgate promised in April 2025 a film "aimed at more mature audiences," and TheWrap took that to mean an R rating, like the live-action movies. ActionNewz expects an R too, but I haven't seen Lionsgate put an actual rating on it.
The story goes back before the 2014 original. John has to complete the Impossible Task, which AWN describes as killing his enemies in one night, to break free of the High Table and be with Helen. The first movie deliberately kept that job off screen, and at CinemaCon, Lionsgate's Adam Fogelson said there's no John Wick story "fans are clamoring for more than the Impossible Task."
Why animate it? It probably comes down to age. Reeves is 62, and this story takes place before a movie that came out 12 years ago. A voice performance gets him a younger John with no de-aging. Plus, Tindle's team can make the body count as big as they want.
Stahelski, who doubled Reeves on The Matrix long before he directed him, said back in April 2025 that "To have the opportunity to develop a John Wick anime seems to be the perfect progression for the John Wick world." But Lionsgate is only saying "animated" so far, and nobody has shown us the style yet.
Reeves has done plenty of voice work, too. He voiced Neo in "Kid's Story" from The Animatrix, along with Duke Caboom in Toy Story 4, Batman in DC League of Super-Pets and Shadow in Sonic the Hedgehog 3. Old-school cartoon fans might even remember him voicing Ted in the 1990 Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventures animated series!
One reader under CBM's story wrote, "We watch John Wick for the action," and I get it, since Stahelski's crew does real stunt work in those movies.
I can't wait to see what Tindle does with Reeves and a whole night of action!
Lionsgate hasn't given it a title or a release date, and there's no footage yet. Next up in the franchise is Caine, the Donnie Yen spin-off that has wrapped production, and Feltheimer says it's had "strong early test screenings."
What do you think? Are you excited to see the Impossible Task in animation? Did you check out Ultraman: Rising on Netflix?
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