John Wick 4’s top-down scene: the game behind it
Smart summary
The overhead Dragon’s Breath shootout in John Wick: Chapter 4 was inspired by The Hong Kong Massacre, a 2019 top-down shooter, not Hotline Miami as most fans guessed. Director Chad Stahelski named the game himself, and reports from the film’s IGN fan screening said he and Keanu Reeves didn’t know Hotline Miami at all.
Halfway through a Paris night, John Wick walks into a run-down apartment building with a shotgun loaded with Dragon’s Breath rounds. Then the camera lifts off the floor and looks straight down. For the next stretch you watch him move room to room like a cursor, every shot drawing a line of fire across the walls.
Half the cinema thought the same thing at once: this is a video game. The only question was which one.
Label: feature and analysis. We separate what the filmmakers said on record from what fans and reports claim.
Which video game inspired the John Wick 4 top-down scene?
The answer is The Hong Kong Massacre, a 2019 indie shooter from the small Swedish studio VRESKI. It plays from directly overhead, with slow-motion dives and huge muzzle flashes, and it openly borrows from John Woo’s Hard Boiled.
Chad Stahelski named it in an interview with /Film after the film opened on March 24, 2023. “I think it was called ‘Hong Kong Massacre,'” he said. “They did this top shot and we had been doing so much with the big muzzle flashes and it just kind of clicked.”
That’s the detail that matters. The team didn’t set out to copy a game. They were already building a film around fire and light, and a game showed them the one angle that made the fire readable.
Did Keanu Reeves and Chad Stahelski know Hotline Miami?
This is where fans got it wrong. Almost everyone online called it the “Hotline Miami scene,” after the 2012 cult shooter from Dennaton Games that made top-down carnage famous. It was the obvious guess, and it was a good one.
Then IGN put the question to the man himself. In a short interview clip, sitting next to Keanu Reeves, Stahelski is asked about the Dragon’s Breath scene and the game fans kept naming. “No, I don’t,” he answers, before pointing to the game that was “an influence for sure.” Watch it below.
The twist is that the fans weren’t entirely wrong either. The Hong Kong Massacre was itself inspired by Hotline Miami. So the film got there through a copy of the game everyone named, without its makers ever playing the original.
How did they shoot the John Wick 4 overhead scene?
The “apartment” is a set. Cinematographer Dan Laustsen told the Motion Picture Association the sequence was planned as one overhead shot following Wick from room to room, on a set built in a studio in Germany. It’s designed to feel like one take.
Stahelski has said the sequence was shot in three days. Stunt coordinator Scott Rogers later said Lionsgate wanted to cut it more than once, in a film that already runs 169 minutes.
It survived, and it became the scene people clip, share and argue about. Rogers has also said Stahelski first brought the idea in as a promo video for the game rather than something he’d played, which fits the “I think it was called” in his own quote.
Pylcrow’s take: the camera is the gamer
That moment when the camera lifts and looks down works because it hands you the controller. You stop watching John Wick and start playing him. Whether the spark came from Hotline Miami or its Swedish cousin, the result is the same: the most “video game” scene in action cinema came from people who hadn’t played the game everyone named.
| Claim | Truth label |
|---|---|
| The Hong Kong Massacre inspired the overhead shot | Documented (Stahelski, on record to /Film) |
| Reeves and Stahelski didn’t know Hotline Miami | Claimed (reported from the IGN screening interview) |
| Stahelski saw a promo video, not the game itself | Claimed (Scott Rogers) |
| Lionsgate wanted to cut the scene | Claimed (Scott Rogers) |
| It’s the best “video game” shot in an action film | Interpreted (our opinion) |
Verdict: not Hotline Miami, but not far from it. The game credit is real, and the fans’ instinct was right.
Quick answers
What is the Dragon’s Breath scene in John Wick 4? It’s the Paris apartment fight where Wick uses a shotgun firing incendiary Dragon’s Breath rounds, filmed from directly overhead like a top-down game.
Can you still play The Hong Kong Massacre? Yes. It was released in 2019 on PC and PlayStation 4, and the official release trailer is on PlayStation Europe’s YouTube channel.
Read next: Which Batman villains could carry a movie without Batman? More in Movies & TV.
Sources: /Film (Stahelski interview); Kotaku; IGN (screening interview); The Escapist; Screen Rant (Scott Rogers); Motion Picture Association (Dan Laustsen); Wikipedia. Truth labels are Pylcrow’s judgment as of November 6, 2026.
