From Baba Yaga to Ballerina: Exploring the Deadly Elegance of the John Wick Universe

Welcome Back to the Continental

"From the World of John Wick: Ballerina" hands the spotlight to Ana de Armas, the first performer besides Keanu Reeves to carry a John Wick feature.

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That's a real bet for a series built around one actor's physicality, and it signals confidence in this world of assassins, coded rules, and black-market currency. Here's how it got this large before judging whether the bet pays off.

How John Wick Built a Franchise

It started in 2014 with action cinema's simplest premise: a retired hitman goes back to work because someone killed his dog. Nobody expected that to spawn four core films, a decades-earlier spinoff series, and now a spinoff feature, each sharpening the house style instead of repeating it.

The Main Saga, Film by Film

John Wick (2014) reset expectations for American action filmmaking: gun fu became its own genre, Keanu Reeves turned economy of movement into a personality trait, and the High Table mythology got its sparest introduction. It's available to stream on Amazon if you want to see where all of this started.

Chapter 2 drags Wick to Rome under a blood debt he can't refuse, where the series starts treating its underworld bureaucracy, markers, and tattoos as seriously as its fight choreography.

Chapter 3: Parabellum pushes the stunt work to its most maximalist register: horses as blunt weapons in Manhattan traffic, a knife fight in a glass room. It's the loosest, most overstuffed film in the saga, and you can find it on Amazon if that glass-room fight alone is worth the price of admission to you.

Chapter 4 sprawls across Osaka, Berlin, and Paris, the franchise trying to top itself before closing this chapter. Whether or not it's the best entry, it's the most conclusive, and it's on Amazon whenever you want to revisit it.

Ballerina: Where It Fits and What It Does With the Mythology

Release Date

Ballerina hit theaters June 6, 2025, from Lionsgate like every other film in the series. It's rated R, standard for this franchise since 2014, telling you exactly what kind of violence to expect. If you missed the theatrical run, you can watch Ballerina on Amazon now that it's made its way to digital shelves.

Cast and Crew

Ana de Armas leads as Rooney, a ballerina assassin driven by revenge. Anjelica Huston's The Director runs the academy with the same cold authority as in Chapter 3. Norman Reedus and Gabriel Byrne round out the cast; Keanu Reeves reprises John Wick in a supporting role. Len Wiseman, behind Underworld and Live Free or Die Hard, directs.

Ballerina slots into the timeline between Chapter 3 and Chapter 4, back at the Russian ballet academy Parabellum only glimpsed. Rooney trains there as both dancer and killer, and the film treats that duality as its reason for existing: every fight reads as ballet technique, not a break from it.

17 Things Worth Knowing About the John Wick Universe

1. Reeves trained hard, and it shows. Keanu Reeves spent years training in judo, jiu-jitsu, and firearms and tactical work with pros, and did most of his own stunts. It's why the fights read as real weight, not a stunt double filling in.
2. "Gun fu" became the franchise's signature style. The blend of judo, jiu-jitsu, and gunplay in every fight got branded gun fu, a label that stuck to this series more than any other.
3. The director used to double for his star. Chad Stahelski doubled for Reeves on The Matrix years before he directed, and has helmed every John Wick film since co-directing the first with David Leitch, staging action he used to perform.
4. Nobody explains what the gold coins are worth or where they come from. Leaving it unexplained makes this underworld feel bigger than any film could show.
5. The Director runs a school for killers disguised as a ballet academy. Anjelica Huston's character, introduced in Chapter 3, trains dancers and assassins under one roof, the premise Ballerina builds into a feature.
6. Daisy was never just a dog: she was Wick's last tether to his late wife, and her death drags him back into a life he'd tried to leave. It's a simple hook, but it's the one this franchise still runs on.
7. The first film arrived without much fanfare, a modest-budget original nobody pitched as a franchise starter. It built its audience through word of mouth, and the sequel got greenlit once people saw it.
8. The body count keeps climbing, though nobody agrees on the exact number. Chapter 4 is generally seen as the series' highest kill count, fan tallies running past 100, though the figure depends on who's counting.
9. Wick's suits do more than look sharp: the films establish his tailoring as ballistic-lined armor, explaining how he survives so many point-blank shootouts.
10. Chapter 4's production spanned multiple countries and stacked large-scale practical stunts for months, the most demanding shoot the franchise had attempted.
11. The Continental spinoff series lives in its own decade, digging into the hotel chain's 1970s origins well before the main timeline.
12. Most of what you're watching is practical. The choreography leans on real execution over digital effects, and that's why the fights still hold up on rewatch.
13. It's easy to picture a "John Wick" class at your local range. The retention shooting and tight-quarters gun work is precise enough that firearms instructors could plausibly borrow it for real training, even without a specific course existing.
14. Charon became a fan favorite for a reason. Lance Reddick's Continental concierge turned a small, formal role into one of the series' most beloved characters, built on composure and loyalty, not screen time.
15. The film that started it all was reportedly titled Scorn during early development, later retitled John Wick ahead of release. Nobody involved has laid out the reasoning, but the earlier title is documented.
16. Donnie Yen improvised more than you'd guess. Donnie Yen's performance as Caine, Wick's blind rival assassin in Chapter 4, reportedly included many unscripted choices, matching how lived-in the character feels.
17. The series wears its influences openly, nodding to The Matrix and classic samurai cinema rather than hiding where its choreography comes from.

What's Next in the Wick-Verse

Ballerina is positioned as the start of an ongoing run of spinoffs, not a one-off. A series centered on the Bowery King has been floated. Wick himself isn't necessarily finished either: talk of a Chapter 5 hasn't gone away.

Final Verdict

Ballerina earns its place through one genuinely good idea: training killers and training dancers are the same discipline in different clothes. That's a sharper conceit than most franchise spinoffs bother with, and it gives Rooney's fights their own physical vocabulary instead of recycling Wick's.

It struggles structurally: slotting the story between Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 means we already know Wick survives and the academy still stands afterward, so every scene between them carries less weight than in a film willing to risk its timeline. It's a spinoff working inside continuity it didn't choose.

If you're already invested, it's worth watching for the choreography alone. If you've never seen a John Wick film, start with the original and Chapter 4 first. This one rewards people who already know the rules of the High Table, not people looking for a way in.

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