20 Recent Box Office Flops Everyone Saw Coming

While you can't really blame Lionsgate for wanting to expand the John Wick series - one of their most lucrative current IP - with spin-offs, there's a fundamental, inescapable fact that Keanu Reeves is John Wick, both as a character and a franchise.

And so, even though Reeves was heavily marketed as making a supporting appearance in Ballerina, it simply wasn't enough to lure most fans of the series out of the house. As kickass and skilled an actress as Ana de Armas is, Ballerina's marketing largely made it look like a paint-by-numbers action-thriller with action sequences a fair few rungs below the main John Wick franchise. 

All the pre-release hubbub about extensive reshoots sure didn't help shift that perception.

It was perfect "wait for streaming" fodder, then, which is hardly what any studio bankrolling a film to the tune of $90 million wants to hear - that's just $10 million less than the cost of John Wick Chapter 4 despite Reeves appearing for just a few brief scenes.

Ballerina ended up grossing just $137.2 million, leaving it miles away from profitability and grossing less than every single mainline Wick movie except the first, which had the huge advantage of being produced for just $30 million. As such, it's little surprise that Lionsgate is now pushing hard for John Wick Chapter 5 to go into production, whatever that might look like considering the ending of Chapter 4 and the state of Reeves' knees.