Ballerina debuted to somewhat softer-than-expected box office numbers in its opening weekend, but (at the time of writing this) the John Wick spinoff is actually in generally good shape from a commercial standpoint ($95 million worldwide on a $90M budget, and counting…). Ballerina focuses on a new protagonist, Eve Macarro (Ana de Armas), trained by the Ruska Roma and hellbent on a mission to avenge the murder of her father by a mysterious cult when she was a child. Eve’s quest and her extremely high kill count put her at odds with the Ruska Roma’s Director, leading to John Wick (Keanu Reeves) eventually stepping into the explosive conflict.
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While Ballerina has enjoyed a highly positive reception on par with the four main John Wick movies, its opening weekend didn’t hit quite the same mark, with the $90 million-budgeted spinoff earning $25 million domestically and debuting in the weekend’s number three spot, with a worldwide opening weekend of $51 million. While every studio no doubt wants their latest tentpole release to start off as strong as possible, the idea that Ballerina needed to open as high as the forthcoming John Wick: Chapter 5 or even the majority of its predecessors to be considered a success is flawed analysis.
Looking at Ballerina within the context of the larger John Wick universe, Eve Macarro’s spinoff is performing roughly as well as it should, along with demonstrating that the overall strength of the John Wick franchise is one that relies and even thrives heavily on longevity and word-of-mouth.
Ballerina Is a John Wick Spinoff, So It’s Box Office Analysis Requires Some Nuance
Despite Ballerina being set in, as its full titles makes clear, the world of John Wick, it’s not a direct narrative sequel, but rather a side story in which Baba Yaga makes an appearance. Moreover, Ana de Armas’ Eve Macarro is a character making her debut in Ballerina, and therefore, one completely new to audiences. Under such circumstances, holding Eve’s first movie up to the John Wick standards of commercial success is an apples-and-oranges comparison.
It would be one thing for Ballerina to be a spin-off focused upon a popular supporting character already established in the John Wick universe, such as Halle Berry’s Sofia from John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum, or the upcoming Donnie Yen-led Caine spin-off building off of his break-out supporting turn in John Wick: Chapter 4. Eve had no such introduction before her big screen debut in Ballerina, which itself also carries the burden of being the first cinematic John Wick spin-off. The most reasonable and fair mandate for Ballerina lies not in hitting the box office heights of the franchise’s box office champ John Wick: Chapter 4, but in getting audiences on-board with the idea of John Wick spin-offs and side-stories in which his presence is either compartmentalized or non-existent (as will reportedly be the case in the Caine spin-off). By that metric, there’s a very different scorecard to analyze Ballerina‘s traction by.
The Best Comparison Point for Ballerina’s Box Office Is the Original John Wick
For as much as the John Wick franchise has come to be such a trendsetting behemoth among action movies, it is very easy to forget that the Baba Yaga’s first chapter was very much a sleeper hit. Releasing to theaters in 2014 after nearing going straight to video and coming after a largely quiet decade in Keanu Reeves’ career, John Wick was a huge comeback for Reeves, cemented in his fourth-wall breaking “Yeah, I’m thinking I’m back!” line, drawing practically universal acclaim for Reeves’ career-defining performance as John Wick, the movie’s revolutionary martial arts and gun fu-style action, and the shadowy assassin-populated world it established. Despite all of this, John Wick was only a modest theatrical success, earning $86 million worldwide on a $20 million budget.
With that said, John Wick‘s theatrical earnings were not what made it a success in the long run, but rather its continued popularity on home media and streaming, and the highly positive word-of-mouth that led to its audience snowballing long after it left theaters. That positioned every subsequent John Wick movie to be a substantially bigger box office hit than the last. Though Ballerina takes place in the same world, the movie is also an introduction to a new corner of the John Wick universe and a new protagonist within it. The real deciding factor in Ballerina’s success is whether it can pull off a word-of-mouth-driven audience expansion beyond theaters, which in turn can establish the viability of characters apart from John Wick himself taking center stage in franchise spin-offs. Judging from critical and audience reception to Ballerina, Eve is off to a great start in accumulating that kind of goodwill.
Ballerina’s Opening Weekend Indicates the Ongoing Strength of the John Wick Franchise
Going back to the first four John Wick movies’ numbers, the opening weekend of each built upon the last through the almost underground success of the first John Wick, which opened to a relatively muted $14.4 million (and landed in the number two spot for that weekend behind the horror movie Ouija). The second, third, and fourth John Wick‘s respectively opened to $30.4 million, $57 million, and $73.8 million, showing the grand success of the mainline John Wick franchise has been bigger each go around, but that it’s also been a relatively gradual development with the franchise’s word-of-mouth being its biggest asset with each new installment. Ballerina opening within spitting distance of John Wick: Chapter 2 demonstrates the middle ground it occupies in the franchise, Ballerina being a beneficiary of the overall popularity of John Wick, but also one that still had to sell audiences and franchise loyalists on someone other than the Baba Yaga as the central protagonist.
Collectively, the John Wick movies are a kind of ongoing illustration of a franchise having legs and the value of analyzing success in a long-run context. Ballerina is best understood as the next step in that concept for the John Wick universe, and as such, proclaiming it a failure for not matching the John Wick sequel’s level of success right from the start would be a fallacy. As with John Wick’s own introduction to audiences, Eve’s sells them on a completely new action heroine. By those metrics, Ballerina opened within the generally proportionate framework of the original John Wick, and like the franchise’s first chapter, has enjoyed nothing but phenomenally positive word-of-mouth. That also points to a general trajectory for Ballerina of enjoying comparable popularity, and having a similar snowball effect in building its audience via word-of-mouth, just as the first John Wick pulled off.
From the World of John Wick: Ballerina is in theaters now.
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