Ballerina Wasn't a John Wick Spin-off? We Explain the Confusion

"Yeah. It's funny, Ballerina was sort of a long time coming, also. Shay Hatten was like an intern for Robert Downey Jr., I had a general meeting with him, he was a huge John Wick fan, and he wrote Ballerina in a vacuum, like as a spec script. He gave it to me, I want to say five years ago, and I read it and was like, ‘Okay.’ It was an assassin, Rooney, it was a female character, but we optioned it and we're like, ‘Let's back this into [the] John Wick universe.’

Then we started developing and making it more Wick. But this was before we'd even shot John Wick 3. [There have - ed. note] been iterations along the way, and as we keep learning more about the universe and creating new characters and refining the Wick world, that sort of enters its way into Ballerina. So, even a year ago, when we were working on the script, it was like, ‘Okay, Winston was sort of there, and the Charon character, and Anjelica Huston, The Director's character,’ but it was like, ‘What do we know now? What is the state of The Continental? What is the timeline? How are we breaking it? What are the reference points we can use?’ Ballerina is this constantly evolving ecosystem of a movie. It's just been really fun to work on."