At 169 minutes, John Wick: Chapter 4 is the longest entry in the Keanu Reeves action series so far, but it was originally even longer. Director Chad Stahelski told IndieWire that the studio never gave him a mandate about length, but when the first cut came in at 225 minutes, or 3 hours and 45 minutes, they knew it was too long.

“To be really honest with you, zero was planned out,” Stahelski said. “Our first cut was three hours and 45 minutes, and it felt like three hours and 45 minutes. We were like, oh, we’re so screwed.”

The lengthy runtime was due in part to how the first cut originally spent more time focusing on the film’s new characters. However, Stahelski and editor Nathan Orloff pared it back to make sure the focus was on Wick. “I wanted to make sure that he was still the center of the universe, that everything always led back to him even though we were cutting away from him,” Orloff said.

Orloff said the idea was to “compress, compress, compress” …