WHAT FRANCHISES CANNOT INHERIT
A Case Study in Ballerina
“The mythology is the reward for the emotional investment. It cannot be the substitute for it.”
When the first John Wick was released in 2014, its premise was, on paper, almost satirically thin. A retired assassin goes to war with the Russian mob because they killed his dog. The dog was a gift from his dead wife. The mob boss’s son did not know who John Wick was.
That is the entire foundation of a film that launched one of the most successful action franchises of the decade. And it worked — not despite its simplicity but because of it. The emotional engine was clear, immediate, and human. Before the mythology arrived, before the Continental and the High Table and the gold coins and the rules, there was a man who had lost something, and who needed to do something about it. Everything else grew from that.
Ballerina has inherited everything the John Wick franchise built in the years since. The world. The rules. The visual language. The mythology. The institutions. The tone. It has also inherited, or attempted to inherit, the emotional authority those films accumulated over four entries and more than a decade.
That authority cannot be inherited. It has to be earned, separately, for every new protagonist, in every new film.
Ballerina does not fully earn it. And the gap between what the film inherits and what it builds for itself is the gap between a film that is technically extraordinary and one that is genuinely moving — between a film you admire and a film you love.
Understanding that gap is the essay’s purpose. Because the failure of Ballerina is not a failure of craft, or direction, or performance, or stunt coordination. It is a failure of a specific kind of structural work that franchise filmmaking makes easy to underestimate and impossible to shortcut.
What Franchises Actually Transfer
A successful franchise accumulates assets over time, and it is worth being precise about what those assets are and what they are not.
The portable assets are considerable. World-building transfers — the Continental, the High Table, the gold coins, the rules of engagement, the specific texture of a society that operates in parallel to the ordinary world. Tone transfers — the heightened reality, the commitment to the mythology, the refusal to wink at the audience. Visual language transfers — the lighting philosophy, the compositional approach, the specific grammar of the action sequences. Even reputation transfers, in the sense that an audience arrives with established goodwill toward a franchise and a baseline willingness to engage.
These are real advantages, and Ballerina uses them well. Len Wiseman’s visual command is evident in every sequence. The film looks extraordinary. The sound design and score are perfectly calibrated to the established universe. The performances understand the heightened reality these films require and commit to it fully. The action team continues to find inventive approaches to environmental combat and practical stunt work that, even after four John Wick films, feel genuinely fresh. Nobody is winking. Nobody is hedging. The film is, in almost every craft dimension, operating at an exceptionally high level.
What does not transfer is emotional investment in a specific person.
Emotional investment is not a franchise asset. It is character-specific. It is built through the particular work of making an audience care about this person — their specific loss, their specific motivation, their specific way of moving through the world. That work cannot be borrowed from previous films, however beloved. It cannot be inherited from a universe, however richly constructed. It cannot be transferred from John Wick to Eve Macarro by proximity or association.
It has to be built. From the beginning. In this film. For this character.
Ballerina does not fully build it. And the consequences of that failure cascade through every department that is otherwise doing exceptional work.
Borrowed Weight
There is a structural function that familiar faces and returning institutions serve in franchise extensions, and it is worth naming precisely because it becomes a problem when it is the primary function they serve.
When a character from a previous film appears in a spinoff, they carry emotional freight from their prior appearances. The audience already has a relationship with them. They already know what this person has been through, what they are capable of, what their presence in a scene implies. That freight is real, and a filmmaker can deploy it economically — a returning face can establish tone, signal stakes, or provide continuity in a single shot that would take scenes to establish from scratch.
But there is a meaningful difference between using borrowed weight economically and relying on it structurally. The first is craft. The second is a substitution — using the audience’s existing investment in familiar elements to stand in for the investment in Eve that the screenplay has not yet built.
Ballerina relies on borrowed weight in the second sense too often and too heavily. Familiar faces appear at moments when Eve’s story should be doing the emotional work. Familiar institutions return to provide context and stakes that the screenplay has not generated through Eve’s own situation. The recognizable rules and mythology of the John Wick universe shape the world in ways that feel authentic to the franchise but that do not emerge from Eve’s specific experience of that world.
The result is a film that feels, in the wrong moments, like an extension of a story we already know rather than the beginning of one we are discovering. The audience is watching Eve’s story through the lens of John Wick’s universe — and the lens, however beautifully crafted, is between us and Eve rather than helping us see her more clearly.
Your review names this precisely: the film borrows emotional investment from the John Wick universe instead of fully earning it for Eve herself. That borrowing is not a small problem. It is the structural issue from which all the others follow.
The First John Wick as Structural Model
It is worth returning to the original film, not to diminish Ballerina by comparison but to understand exactly what the first John Wick did that made everything else possible.
The mythology of that film is, by any reasonable measure, as absurd as anything in Ballerina. A secret society of assassins with its own economy, its own hotel, its own rules of engagement — none of this is more inherently credible than what Ballerina asks the audience to accept. The world of John Wick is a fantasy. It always was.
But the emotional engine was not a fantasy. It was as simple and as human as cinema gets. A man lost his wife. She left him a puppy so he would have something to love. Someone took the puppy. The man cannot bring his wife back. He can do something about the puppy.
That is grief, and purpose, and loss, and the specific way that action can feel like a substitute for mourning. It requires no explanation and no setup. The audience feels it immediately. And because they feel it immediately, they are inside John Wick’s story before the mythology has been established — which means the mythology, when it arrives, has an emotional foundation to rest on rather than having to generate its own.
Everything in the John Wick universe grew from that foundation. The Continental is interesting because John Wick needs sanctuary. The gold coins matter because John Wick needs resources. The rules of engagement have weight because John Wick is operating inside them. The mythology is in service of the emotional engine, not the other way around.
Ballerina inherits the mythology without fully building the engine. Eve’s motivation exists — revenge, loss, a history with violence — but it is established quickly and built thinly, and the film moves into franchise territory before that foundation is solid enough to support the weight being placed on it. The mythology arrives, as it did in John Wick, fully formed and impressively detailed. But this time, the audience is learning the world and learning Eve simultaneously, and the world is winning.
The lesson is not that spinoffs cannot work. It is that they must solve the same foundational problem the original solved — and must solve it first, before the franchise machinery engages. The mythology is the reward for the emotional investment. It cannot be the substitute for it.
The Flamethrower Problem
There is a specific diagnostic moment in Ballerina that illuminates the consequences of the structural failure with unusual precision.
A flamethrower sequence — staged with remarkable technical ambition and executed with the kind of practical commitment that distinguishes this franchise from its imitators — produces a response that is the opposite of what great action should generate. Instead of feeling the danger, the audience begins thinking about the mechanics. Instead of caring whether the character survives, they find themselves evaluating whether the sequence makes logical sense.
That drift — from emotional engagement to analytical observation — is not a failure of the sequence itself. The sequence, by every technical measure, is exceptional. It is a failure of the foundation beneath it.
Great action works emotionally when the audience is sufficiently invested in the people performing it. The investment does not require them to consciously think about the character during the sequence — in fact, the opposite is true. When investment is genuine, the audience is inside the action, experiencing it rather than watching it. Analytical observation is impossible because emotional engagement has crowded it out.
When investment is insufficient, the reverse happens. The audience cannot fully access the emotional experience because they do not have a strong enough relationship with the person in danger. They default to observation. They begin to notice the craft — which is impressive, and worth noticing — but they notice it as craft rather than as story. The sequence becomes a demonstration rather than an experience.
This is precisely what your review describes: admiring the filmmaking while simultaneously questioning the storytelling. Those two responses are not contradictory. They are what happens when craft has outpaced foundation — when the film is doing extraordinary technical work in service of an emotional relationship with the protagonist that hasn’t been fully established.
The flamethrower sequence is not the problem. It is the symptom. The problem is everything that should have happened before it.
What Performers Cannot Do
Ana de Armas gives a committed and convincing performance throughout Ballerina. This is worth stating clearly, because the film’s structural failure is sometimes misread as a performance failure, and the misreading matters.
A performer can do a great deal with insufficient material. They can bring specificity to underwritten moments, find truth in scenes that don’t fully earn it, create the impression of depth where the screenplay has provided only surface. De Armas does all of this. Eve is watchable, credible, and physically compelling throughout.
What a performer cannot do is build the foundation the screenplay has not built. They cannot establish motivation that hasn’t been dramatized. They cannot create the sense of earned inevitability — the feeling that every decision this character makes could only have happened this way — when the screenplay has arrived at the right destinations by the least interesting routes. They cannot make relationships carry emotional weight that hasn’t been established through time and specificity on screen.
Screenplay problems are, in the end, the only category of filmmaking problem that cannot be solved by any other department. Direction can obscure them. Performance can mitigate them. Craft can distract from them temporarily. But they cannot be fixed after the screenplay is locked, because they are structural — they exist at the level of what the film is, not how it is made.
Ballerina‘s screenplay repeatedly asks its departments to carry weight it hasn’t built. Characters possess information without the audience understanding how they obtained it. Relationships appear moments before they’re expected to carry emotional significance. Revelations arrive because the story needs them rather than because they emerge naturally from character and situation.
De Armas navigates these gaps with skill. The stunt team works around them with invention. Wiseman compensates for them with visual authority. None of it is enough, because the problem is not in any of those departments. The problem is prior to all of them.
The Spinoff's Unique Burden
Ballerina faces a structural challenge that is specific to franchise extensions and worth naming as such.
A spinoff exists in a peculiar narrative space. It is neither sequel nor original — it inherits a world and a mythology but must generate a new protagonist, new stakes, and new emotional foundations within that inherited context. This creates a tension that is easy to underestimate: the franchise’s existing architecture is both an asset and a constraint.
It is an asset because it provides a rich, established world that does not need to be built from scratch. It is a constraint because that world has its own gravitational pull — its existing characters, its established stakes, its accumulated emotional history — that can draw narrative attention away from the new protagonist at exactly the moments when the new protagonist most needs it.
Managing this tension is the spinoff’s unique burden. The film must be fluent in the franchise’s language while telling a new story in that language. It must honor the existing mythology while building new emotional foundations that do not depend on the mythology to function. It must use the inherited world as context for Eve’s story rather than allowing Eve’s story to become context for the inherited world.
Ballerina does not fully solve this tension. The franchise’s gravitational pull is too strong in too many scenes, and Eve’s story is not yet grounded enough to resist it. The result is a film that feels, in the wrong moments, like a very impressive episode of a show we are already watching rather than the beginning of something new.
This is not an indictment of the franchise extension as a form. It is a precise description of the work the form requires — work that is distinct from what either a sequel or an original film requires, and work that must be done before any other consideration.
The Engine Must Come First
The John Wick franchise built something rare: a mythology so fully realized and so consistently executed that it has become its own genre. The world is coherent, the rules are consistent, the tone is distinctive, and the commitment of every department to that tone is unwavering.
Ballerina demonstrates that these achievements, as impressive as they are, cannot substitute for the foundational work of building an audience’s relationship with a new protagonist. That relationship is the engine. Everything else — the mythology, the choreography, the visual language, the returning faces — is what the engine powers.
Build the engine first. Then let the franchise do what franchises do.
Eve Macarro deserved that foundation. The extraordinary craftspeople working on this film deserved it too. Every stunning sequence, every immaculate frame, every technically inventive action beat was in service of a story that had not yet given the audience sufficient reason to care whether she survived.
That is the essay’s conclusion, and it is a generous one: Ballerina fails not because it lacks ambition or talent or craft, but because it trusted the franchise to do work that only a screenplay can do.
The world of John Wick is impressive enough to make you forget, temporarily, that the emotional engine hasn’t been fully built.
Temporarily is not enough.