Ballerina Having Reshoots by John Wick Director

Movies

The John Wick spin-off had to call in the big guns. In an interview with the British talk show The One Show, actor Ian McShane, who plays Winston Scott, Wick’s friend and manager of the Continental Hotel, spoke about Ballerina, the upcoming film set in the John Wick universe. Ballerina was originally going to be released on June 7, 2024, but according to a Deadline exclusive, it was pushed back to June 6, 2025, with its former release date going to the remake of The Crow. Reshoots were the stated reason, but McShane clarifies the extent of them a bit in his interview, casting a rather large pall on Ballerina and its director, Len Wiseman:

Ian McShane on #TheOneShow is great because I love the honesty – talking about how Ballerina wasn’t good so they need to shoot more stuff to protect the franchise and then how they don’t talk about The Continental show because they just made it without consulting Keanu and him 😭 pic.twitter.com/LwbQrTzLpU

— Adam Khan (@Adam_Khan100) February 22, 2024

Ballerina sounds like it’s in a lot of trouble at the moment. Len Wiseman hasn’t made all that many movies; outside of Live Free or Die Hard (which doesn’t exist) and the Total Recall remake (which also doesn’t exist), he’s only directed the Underworld films. Was his work on Ballerina so bad that Chad Sahelski had to be recruited to fix it to such an extent that the movie needs another year before it’s released? I guess Lionsgate thinks so. This isn’t the first time Stahelski has been called in to help a struggling filmmaker; reports said that he joined Birds of Prey as a second-unit director to “help” Cathy Yan with the action scenes. But Cathy Yan had never made a big-budget movie before Birds of Prey; Wiseman has done seven (even if two of them, once again, don’t exist). And based on the ones I’ve seen, his movies don’t look bad, so it’s hard to believe things were so dire with Ballerina that Stahelski – as much as I like him – had to take over for Wiseman. It makes me wonder what the movie looks like right now; it also makes me wonder what Ballerina’s budget will be like when all is said and done. I don’t see this making as much money as a regular John Wick film, but with a limited budget, it could still have been a hit. With an extra year of development, reshoots (or “new-shoots,” as McShane calls them) this extensive, and a new director to pay, I think Lionsgate can wave bye-bye to their profits on this one. Unless Ballerina becomes the sleeper hit of the decade, they were probably better off rolling the dice on Wiseman’s cut.

Also, I love that Ian McShane threw some shade at The Continental, which sucked. It’s not hard to believe the John Wick crew had nothing to do with it.