John Wick 4 Guns

Michael Green   May 02, 2025

This is a snippet from a great article from Recoil Magazine. A link to the full article is at the end of this post if you would like to read more about the guns used on John Wick 4. Plus its a great site with a lot of content and is worth checking out. Enjoy!

MARLIN 1894 LEVER GUN BY MAD PIG CUSTOMS AND WILD WEST GUNS 

The story of the lever gun seen in JW4 has some interesting turns. The production company needed rifles, and Marlin had recently gone out of business. Ruger bought the company but was nowhere close to being able send product to a movie.

 

Galotti was able to source 13 Marlin 1894 Dark rifles in .44 Magnum. Why so many guns? Filming is expensive. When guns go down, it burns time, so multiple guns were needed for each location. Since this gun was used by Mr. Nobody throughout the movie, it also was needed in multiple filming locations, including Paris and Berlin. International permits and such required that each location have a set of guns to ensure filming could be done effectively. 

Mad Pig Customs reached out to Wild West Guns to perform the takedown conversions on the rifles. Midwest Industries supplied the Marlin M-LOK handguards, and SilencerCo provided both actual and inert Octane 45s with ASR mounts. The barrels were cut down to 14.5 inches and the top of the handguards scalloped. They had to permanently attach the ASR muzzle brakes; the .44 Magnum barrel is too thin for a shoulder, so each barrel was cut to fit a specific brake by indexing off the muzzle.  

 

For a tactical look, XS Sights extended the optic rail all the way to the end of the barrel. It’s sandwiched between the front sight and the barrel to hold it in place, and even the screws used were one-offs. The front sights weren’t just standard XS 1894 sights either, they were prototypes supplied by XS with luminescent stripes. Slate Black Industries provided the Slate Stop hand stop and rail covers that covered the entire handguard.

The process of turning these into takedown models was its own endeavor. Due to the compressed schedule, there wasn’t time to build all 13 guns into takedowns, so only four were made — the other nine were conventional guns that externally looked nearly identical to the others. Wild West Guns was asked to make quarter-turn takedowns, requiring the use of interrupted threads. That isn’t the best idea on these guns for longevity, so two were made with interrupted threads, and the two used for prolonged firing were fully threaded. 

The extended top rails on the takedowns were wire EDM’d to ensure the tightest possible fit. 

Wild West Guns uses a large aluminum block to support the magazine tube and affix the Midwest Industries Handguard on their takedown conversions, which needed to be slightly modified. Since there were rail panels on nearly every M-LOK slot, each slot needed holes drilled and tapped to allow the panels to be screwed directly into the block. 

The stock and trigger were Ranger Point Precision items. Even the Grim Hunter Tactical Gear stock cuffs with 10-round ammunition cards were modified for the film. Normally, the elastic webbing is 1.5 inches wide, but the brass ammo needed to be more visible, so they used thinner elastic. 

Speaking of ammo, there was an interesting issue with blanks and the guns. According to Mad Pig’s owner, Steve Tyliszczack:

“One of the most interesting challenges with this project was the feeding and function of the rifles. Lever guns are complex, and they are designed to function in a very specific way. What we learned is that the .44 high flash blanks didn’t want to function in the guns. 

The blank has all the weight in the rim, as opposed to the bullet up front so they sit rim down instead of nose down. This change in orientation of the round significantly affected how the rifles fed, and each gun had to have the actions tweaked for feeding until we were able to get them to feed reliably.”

Unfortunately, during the process of filming, some of these rifles had other issues and a few of the parts were discontinued and are no longer available. So, as of this writing, it’s not possible to get an exact copy of one of the movie guns, but that doesn’t mean we won’t see something special in the future from Mad Pig Customs.

Read the full article on the guns of John Wick 4 at Recoil Magazines web portal:  Guns of John Wick 4