....

[The Incredible Hulk] movie box office run almost near its end and Regal was back to business.

He started to work on his next projects, and within that process, he decided to make an introduction video of his most anticipated film:

[John Wick].

"We have to start with the question." Jessica said. "...that has been trending, on and off, for nearly two years."

"During your appearance on ’Who Wants to Be a Millionaire’." she continued, turning to Regal. "...the audience found out that you have Keanu saved in your contacts as John Wick. You revealed that night they would find out what it meant eventually."

She paused in the way of someone who had been saving a pause for exactly this moment. "Is eventually today?"

Regal waited before answering.

"I have always said I don’t make films for the audience I already have." he said. "I make them for the audience I want to create. People who don’t know they’re waiting for something yet."

He glanced at Keanu briefly. "By the time this comes out, they will understand why it was always going to be this one."

He looked back at Jessica.

"I know Keanu, he is my best buddy and family. And as a director and writer, I know his strengths, and his weaknesses. I know what he hasn’t been asked to do yet, which is the more interesting list.

"His fans have asked me for a while to put him in the MDCU. And every time, we have had the same conversation, both of us, independently arriving at the same place."

He paused. "We didn’t want to come back together inside something that already existed. We wanted to build something new, that started with him."

He let that land.

"I have written scripts with specific actors in mind before. I did it for Stephen Hawking Sr. with Superman. I knew the role before I knew the film around it. But this is different.

"John Wick is the first time I have written an entire film, from the ground up, for one person. Not a role within a story. The story itself, constructed around what that person is capable of."

Jessica turned to Keanu with the expression of someone about to ask the obvious follow-up and finding the obvious follow-up was actually the right one. "That’s the biggest thing he has said about any project in years. How does it feel to hear it? How confident were you before signing the script?"

Keanu’s expression moved through something briefly before settling into the easy candour that made him genuinely difficult to interview badly. "I actually didn’t read the script when we signed the project."

A beat.

"You haven’t."

"No."

"But you just signed?"

"Indeed, and it has nothing to do with me. It is all the confidence I have in Regal."

He said it with the dry lightness of someone stating a fact that was also, incidentally, exactly what he wanted. "I didn’t need to read it. I know how Regal works. He could make a [Following] sequel tomorrow, open on the recognition alone, guarantee himself a certain number.

"He could make a [Matrix] continuation and have studios throwing money at him. However, I also know he is not going to do either of those things unless the script justifies them, and he knows it, and I know he knows it."

He looked at Regal with the specific quality of trust that had nothing performed in it. "You would be genuinely stupid to not trust someone with that kind of relationship to their own work, and we made a promise after we finished [Following]. That when the right thing came along we would do it without the usual hedging."

He looked back at Jessica. "This is the right thing."

"So he said ’I have a film, you’re the lead,’ and that was sufficient."

"That was completely sufficient, yes."

The room found this funnier than Keanu had intended it, which he accepted with the good nature of someone who understood that the most honest answers were sometimes also the funniest ones.

....

Jessica consulted her notes, which she did not actually need, and looked up. "Can you tell us anything about the script? The character? The world?"

"It’s too soon." Regal said.

"Nothing at all."

"Nothing that would serve you better than what you’ll see when it’s ready."

"Fair enough." She shifted. "Different question then. Is this film rated R?"

"Almost certainly."

She tilted her head. "Doesn’t that create tension with the audience base the MDCU has been building? There are a lot of younger fans in that universe." 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝙬𝙚𝓫𝒏𝓸𝓿𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝙤𝓶

"Red Studio has a specific framework for what it produces. This film exists outside that framework, and outside the MDCU entirely. Every film has the audience it’s meant for, and I think it’s worth respecting that rather than trying to make every project palatable to every demographic simultaneously."

He paused. "Besides... we have never actually made films specifically for children."

Jessica raised an eyebrow. "You haven’t?"

"We made films for adults that happened to be suitable for children. That’s a different thing. The MDCU films are about identity and responsibility and what power costs... Those are adult themes in accessible packaging."

He looked at the audience. "When people say a film is ’for kids’ I think they sometimes mean it’s unchallenging, which is a different claim and not one I am particularly interested in defending. I’ve never thought children were uncapable of complexity.

"They’re extraordinarily capable of it and essentially full-time learning machines.... their entire existence at that age is the project of figuring out how everything works, and they’re ferociously good at it."

He stopped. "What they don’t have yet is taste. Not because they lack the intelligence for it... they have far more than most adults give them credit for. But taste is accumulated through experience and time, and they simply haven’t had enough of either yet.

"So they will watch almost anything that holds their attention, which is actually a wonderful quality, but it means you’re not making creative decisions for them, you’re making them for you and then checking whether the result works for everyone."

"And John Wick doesn’t work for everyone."

"John Wick is specifically for the people it’s for." Regal said. "That’s not a limitation. That’s the point."

....

Jessica let the room settle from that, which took a moment, and then looked at her notes one final time and set them down.

"I have one question left." she said. "One."

Regal looked at her.

"When."

The simplicity of it got a laugh from the audience, not a dismissive one, the laugh of people who had been waiting for someone to ask the thing everyone wanted asked.

Regal turned slightly toward the screen behind him.

The poster had gone up two days before the showcase and had generated the specific kind of internet energy that comes from something that gives you just enough to want more and not enough to feel satisfied.

It was sparse by design: the title, [John Wick], in clean white text, and if you looked past the immediate impact of the image, two more lines sitting quietly beneath it.

Baba Yaga.

The Boogeyman’s Arrival.

Most people had been too busy looking at Keanu pointing a gun at them to notice the second line on first viewing. The ones who had noticed it had been attempting to explain its significance to the ones who hadn’t for forty-eight hours.

Regal looked at the poster for a moment, then back at Jessica.

"Soon." he said.

The room received it accordingly.

....

The showcase ended at 10:47 PM.

By 10:49, the clip of Keanu saying he had signed the contract without reading the script was the most shared moment of the evening, which was saying something given the competition.

The comment sections underneath it divided cleanly into two camps:

People who found it the most romantic professional trust they had ever witnessed. And people who found it genuinely alarming from a contractual standpoint.

Both camps were large and vocal and occasionally bleeding into each other in interesting ways.

The poster, which had been available for two days already, had a second wave of attention as people who had only glanced at it the first time went back to look properly.

Baba Yaga landed first for the people who knew the mythology; the old Slavic figure, the witch of the deep wood, the thing children were told about to keep them from wandering too far.

The comments under the poster explaining this to people who didn’t know it were, unusually for internet comment sections, patient and thorough.

MDCU fans had developed a culture around welcoming new people into the material that showed up consistently in these moments.

The Boogeyman’s Arrival took longer to process.

People were confused.

What does arrival imply?

....

By morning the showcase had generated more coverage than any LIE announcement since the first MDCU trailer.

And the two words that appeared most consistently across every piece, every thread, every group chat screenshot.... were the ones Regal had said twice, the second time like a door closing on any remaining doubt.

Soon.

....

.

[To be continued...]

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