Baba Yaga bodycount: Here’s how many people John Wick actually kills in the first three John Wicks

If there’s one thing that everyone in the ludicrously assassin-stuffed universe of the John Wick movies can seemingly agree on, it’s that John Wick is very good at killing people. It’s the first thing anyone ever says about Keanu Reeves’ perpetually unsuccessful retired killer: John Wick is great at murder. John Wick is the guy you send to kill the boogeyman. John Wick cannot be trusted near your stationery cabinet. Don’t kill John Wick’s dog, Theon Greyjoy; you will not enjoy what happens next. (He kills you.)

But with John Wick: Chapter 4 heading into theaters this weekend, we had to ask ourselves: How good is John Wick at killing people, precisely? We know he does a lot of murders across the first three Wick movies. But how many? Can we express it as a rate of murders per minute? Or Greyhound buses loaded up with the bodies of his victims? And what are his most brutal and brilliant kills?

And so, we embarked on an extremely scientific survey of Reeves and director Chad Stahelski’s John Wick (2014), John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017), and John Wick: Chapter 3—Parabellum (2019). Which is to say that we watched all three movies back-to-back, and made a note every time John Wick totally murders someone—and an extra note every time we went “Oh, fuck!” after he did so. (There were a lot of margin note “Oh fuck!”s.) The end result was the following report, broken up by movie, highlighting bloodiest scenes and best kills, and answering the question: What is the Baba Yaga’s official on-screen bodycount?

First kill, John Wick: Home Invasion, Part 2, at 29:25

The original John Wick spends a good long portion of its initial run-time setting up its premise and/or establishing puppy cuteness. (Followed swiftly by, uh … puppy mortality.) Instead of seeing John shoot people in the head, the film sells his sheer lethality through little touches, like the horrified “Oh” that Russian mob boss Viggo Tarasov (Michael Nyqvist) emits when told exactly who his son Iosef has made an implacable enemy of. It’s nearly a full half-hour into the movie before we get to see the Baba Yaga in action ourselves, as a dozen of Viggo’s goons make a desperate pre-emptive attempt to cut Wick’s vengeance short, by invading his home for the second time in as many days. At which point, yeah: He shoots them in the fucking head, establishing his go-to maneuver for swift bad-guy dispatching for the rest of these films. (There are a few struggling stragglers, though, including one dude who gets an early, brutal neck crack across the Wicks’ otherwise immaculate kitchen counter—the first “Oh fuck” on our list, by the by.) One dinner reservation for 12, on its way.