The John Wick franchise turned greater than only a saga following Keanu Reeves’ title murderer when it delivered the Peacock subscription-exclusive prequel collection The Continental in 2023. Now we’re about to enter spinoff territory once more with the 2025 film launch of Ballerina, which stars Ana de Armas within the lead function. This time although, Reeves will get to partake on this aspect quest as John Wick, though this didn’t mark the primary time he and de Armas met. A decade in the past, the previous confirmed the latter choreography from the primary John Wick film.
Ana de Armas, who has earlier motion expertise from No Time to Die, The Grey Man and Ghosted, mirrored on that have whereas showing on The Tonight Present Starring Jimmy Fallon. She and Keanu Reeves first labored collectively on Knock Knock, and after they made one another’s acquaintance, he confirmed off a number of the strikes he’d performed for John Wick, which hadn’t been launched but. In de Armas’ phrases:
The primary time we met, we had been at lunch, and he instructed us the story about John Wick. Like, he had simply wrapped the primary John Wick…He bought up from the chair in the course of the restaurant and began doing one of many choreos in entrance of everyone. I used to be like ‘Nicely, he seems excited.’
As effectively he ought to have been! Whereas Keanu Reeves had no concept on the time that John Wick would spawn a preferred franchise, the motion choreography alone was sufficient to make it stand out from the group. So Ana de Armas and everybody else in that restaurant bought a particular tease for what was to return, and man, I want I may’ve been there. When John Wick was launched in October 2014, it was met with constructive essential reception and made $86 million worldwide, someplace round three-four instances its finances. Chapter 2 was greenlit just a few months later, and the remainder is historical past.
Now the time has come to highlight Ana de Armas’ Eve Macarro in Ballerina, as we’ll see her coaching to actual revenge on the individuals who killed her father. That can embody her clashing with John Wick, and de Armas went on to clarify simply how a lot these motion pictures imply to Keanu Reeves, whom she’s now labored with 3 times (additionally they co-starred in Uncovered):
These varieties of films, I imply, that is his pleased place. That is what he likes to do. He loves rehearsing, he loves martial arts….However so beneficiant too when he goes to set, and he is aware of you are attempting to determine it out. So, he provides you your time, and he simply steps again, he is by no means imposing something. After which whenever you’re prepared, he is like ‘I am coming for you.’
Ballerina takes place between the occasions of the third and fourth John Wick motion pictures. As such, we’ll discover Reeves’ character after he was discovered by The Bowery King, however earlier than he began finishing up his mission of vengeance in opposition to The Excessive Desk. Though John Wick: Chapter 5 is in growth, if it doesn’t get off the bottom it’s solely doable Ballerina would be the final time we see him taking part in the character since Chapter 4 ended with him being presumed useless.
However finally Ballerina is Ana de Armas’ platform to shine on, and her different co-stars embody Anjelica Huston, Ian McShane, the late Lance Reddick, Gabriel Byrne and Norman Reedus, amongst others. The motion flick, which arrives in theaters on June 6, was directed by Len Wiseman and written by Shay Hatten, and John Wick helmer Chad Stahelski oversaw the reshoots, though he’ll go uncredited for that work.