Lionsgate expanding John Wick universe with "Ballerina"

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hea...script-1024318

"Lionsgate has won a bidding war to pick up a female-centric spec action script titled Ballerina that will serve as a platform for a possible John Wick spinoff.

Basil Iwanyk, whose Thunder Road banner is behind the hit Wick action franchise starring Keanu Reeves, will produce Ballerina.

Ballerina has been described as being in the vein of La Femme Nikita, the 1990 female-centric assassin movie that helped launch the career of filmmaker Luc Besson, but with a more pulpy, hyper-stylized bent a la Quentin Tarantino or Matthew Vaughn.

Details are being kept under the tutu, but the story is known to center on a young woman raised as an assassin who must hunt down the other assassins that murdered her family."

Never heard that one before.

Yeah, I don't know about the fringes (to mainstream squares like me) that they are getting too. This struck me like the news of the Bloodshot(?)/ Leto movie. We might be getting close to saturation.

Then again, me being a lame would cheer if they announced a Moon Knight movie.

I guess it doesn't matter. It struck me weird that they are buying a script and folding it into the JW universe.

I'll watch it if it's like John Wick which is alot of fun. Still have to see John Wick 2.

https://deadline.com/2019/10/john-wi...es-1202754898/

"Lionsgate has set Len Wiseman to direct Ballerina, an action spinoff of the lucrative John Wick franchise.

Ballerina focuses on a young female assassin who seeks revenge against the people who killed her family. The picture is on a fast track, with a script by Shay Hatten, whose credits include the Zack Snyder-directed Army of the Dead for Netflix and John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum.

The picture is being produced by Basil Iwanyk, Erica Lee and Chad Stahelski, with John Wick star Keanu Reeves an executive producer. The female character was glimpsed in the last John Wick film and it isn’t clear at this point whether Reeves will be in the film, though if he does it will be a cameo. Unity Phelan is in the credits of Parabellum under the character Ballerina, but I am not sure who will be the star of the spinoff."

This strikes me as a bad idea. The John Wick world-building is a double-edged sword that at once gives the series so much of its character but also makes each successive film a little more unwieldy so the idea of stretching that into spin-offs sounds like it would be a bridge too far (especially if it's just a means of diluting the brand by connecting it to initially-unrelated scripts).

Also, Len Wiseman is obviously not a good choice for a director.

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I really don't see the point in a spin-off (outside of the studio making money). They were already beginning to stretch themselves thin at the end of John Wick 3, so adding on more to the universe with another character and their own story line is a bit daft. Why would anyone care to see this movie? People watch the Wick films for John Wick not the universe.