John Wick, by all estimates, should’ve been a dumb, one-shot action movie. A relatively cheap action project from an actor we don’t think about all that often. A combination of great action and an intriguing little world caught our attentions, though, and now producers are looking to turn Wick’s world into a universe with a female-led movie about a new character.
Lionsgate announced this week that it will move forward with Ballerina, an action flick intended to be a John Wick spinoff.
The source of the script is pretty interesting. The Hollywood Reporter notes that the writer behind the movie is Shay Hatten, a 23-year-old writer currently working for Robert Downey Jr.’s production company, and the writer behind the very strange Maximum King! script, which tells the story of the making of Stephen King’s Maximum Overdrive, a script that landed on Hollywood’s “Black List” of hot-but-unproduced scripts.
The whole thing is in the early stages, but of all the things Hollywood is trying to turn into universes, this is one of the few I’m actually eager to see move forward. The Continental, the hotel at the center of Wick’s world, and all of its rules and guests, was immediately intriguing, and left me eager to learn more as I went into John Wick: Chapter 2. I’m looking forward to hearing more about Ballerina as it moves forward.