Few actors have delivered as many box-office hits as Keanu Reeves has over the last 30 years, and few have suffered more as a result of Hollywood studios’ new era of franchise building and risk aversion. The actor known for Bill & Ted, Point Break, Speed, and The Matrix trilogy stars in the upcoming John Wick, which, while filled with action, is yet another independent film.
In fact, Reeves hasn’t worked with a major studio since the big-budget martial-arts flick 47 Ronin bombed big time for Universal in 2013 (expensive re-shoots delayed it a year), and before that, he hadn’t worked with a studio since the 2008 Warner Brothers remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still. As he explains in a new interview, he’s not all that happy about the studio abandonment.
"It sucks, but it’s just the way it is," Reeves tells Indiewire. “You can have positive and negative experiences, but what I like about studios are the resources and the worlds that they can create. Obviously, a lot of good filmmakers work on studio movies. Even when I was working on studio movies more often, I was always doing independent movies. So for me, that was just not happening, but I want to keep going, making things, and telling stories.”
The inability to land a studio film is not for lack of trying on Reeves’s part. As he told Yahoo Movies recently, he has been attempting for years to bring the Black List script Passengers to the big screen, and in 2013, The Weinstein Company — an indie, albeit a deep-pocketed one — picked up the rights. But the project has been plagued by the departures of actresses like Reese Witherspoon and Rachel McAdams, as well as financial problems. Weinstein eventually dropped Passengers, and earlier this year, Universal’s Focus Features failed to resurrect the film.
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