While John Wick is infamous for expertly carrying out any assassination mission he takes on, whether it be professional or personal, he still hasn’t killed his most dangerous target. As it stands in John Wick’s ongoing film continuity, John is at war with the Continental and the High Table after he refused to kill his friend and the New York City Continental Hotel manager Winston only to be betrayed by him when Winston was accepted back into the criminal organization. While John will assuredly seek vengeance for that betrayal in the fourth installment of the film franchise, he still has some unfinished business from his past that deserves his immediate attention.
In the prequel comic series John Wick by Greg Pak and Giovanni Valletta, John is on a personal mission to hunt down and kill every member of a gang that was responsible for destroying his home town and killing those who were close to him when he was a child. During his journey, John runs into a Russian mafia boss named Maria who offers to hire him as an assassin for her syndicate. John respectfully refuses, saying he is just a freelancer and that he is currently on a job that is personal, not professional. While Maria accepts his refusal on the surface, she secretly schemes to make John work for her against his will.
When John Wick and the gang he is hunting have their final showdown, John finds himself in need of life-saving assistance and calls Maria for help. Maria happily does so only if John agrees to work for her from that point forward, and John reluctantly agrees. By the end of the last issue, John Wick realizes that Maria orchestrated the entire mission, from John Wick first learning the location of the gang he was after at the very beginning to the dire situation he found himself in at the end. All along, Maria was plotting to get John Wick under her employ, and in the end she was successful in manipulating him to work for her. Maria’s cunning and ruthlessness makes her an enormous threat to John, one that is too dangerous to be left alive.
Maria proved herself to be an incredibly dangerous force throughout the comic series, in part because of how she handled John Wick but also how she tricks others to do her bidding as well. In the series, the gang of villains John is after go to Maria for help in escaping their pursuer, giving them their markers in exchange for her assistance in relocating them to a safe location. In an ironically cruel twist, Maria says she’ll help them get away from John Wick if they successfully kill John Wick, taking advantage of the limitless parameters surrounding the marker system. Of course, Maria knows they won’t be successful, but she needs them to pin John down long enough for him to call her for help, a sinister plan that she executed to perfection. As far as fans know, Maria is still alive in the current continuity of John Wick, and if she could so effortlessly manipulate John into selling his soul to her without his knowledge or consent, then who knows what else she is capable of.
Before John Wick launches his assault on the Continental and the High Table, he should definitely eliminate Maria first before John Wick’s most dangerous threat causes him any more trouble.
