As word again surfaces that John Wick spin-off Ballerina has been heavily retooled, we look at whether reshoots always spell doom for a movie…
On live television in February, veteran actor Ian McShane suggested, with surprising candour, that the upcoming action spin-off Ballerina was getting “not reshoots – new shoots.”
Publicists at Lionsgate probably spat out a mouthful of tea when McShane, a regular in the John Wick franchise of which Ballerina is a part, said that entirely new sequences had been shot for the movie, and that director Chad Stahelski had come in to oversee them. Months later, however, and McShane’s outburst has been backed up by a new report, which suggests that Stahelski – who’s been drafted in to take over from original director Len Wiseman – has essentially re-shot most of the movie.
If true, it’d certainly explain why Ballerina – which stars Ana de Armas and takes place between action flicks John Wick 3 and 4 – was delayed by a full year, from its original release date in June 2024 to June 2025. It might also spell yet more trouble for Lionsgate, a studio which has seen a string of its films struggle at the box office in recent months, including Borderlands and The Crow. As McShane said in February, “They’ve got to protect the franchise,” and the last thing Lionsgate needs is a release that tarnishes John Wick – one of the biggest properties it currently owns.
Assuming the reshoots are as extensive as reported, does that necessarily spell doom for Ballerina? Of course not – though history tells us that the fate of reworked movies can be somewhat mixed. On the positive side of the equation, The Wizard Of Oz had all sorts of problems during its production in the late 1930s; its script was subject to multiple rewrites from a string of wordsmiths, while original director Mervyn LeRoy was replaced by George Cukor, who was then replaced by Victor Fleming. While this was going on, previously shot footage was junked, and actor Buddy Ebsen, the original Tin Man, got so ill from his metallic makeup – which contained powdered aluminium – that he had to be replaced by Jack Haley.
In a similar vein, Back To The Future famously re-cast Eric Stoltz with Michael J Fox early in its shoot – meaning several sequences had to be filmed again – and that movie turned out just fine. Both Ridley Scott’s Alien and James Cameron’s Aliens required two last-minute casting changes that would change film history; John Hurt stepped in to play the ill-fated Kane in Alien when actor Jon Finch was too ill to continue. Michael Biehn was a late addition to Aliens, and drafted in when original Hicks actor James Remar was arrested for drug possession at a British airport. (You can still see Remar’s back in one or two shots.) These days, it’s hard to imagine anyone but Hurt and Biehn in their respective parts.
There are some reshoots and re-castings, however, that leave us wondering what might have been. In February 2017, comedy specialists Phil Lord and Chris Miller began work on Solo: A Star Wars Story – what would presumably have been pitched as a lighter, more loose spin-off from the main franchise. Four months later, Lord and Miller were out and veteran director Ron Howard was drafted in; producers at Lucasfilm, reports went, were unhappy with how the directors were handling (or diverging from) screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan’s script. It’s thought that little of Lord and Miller’s footage remains in the finished Solo.
More disappointingly, the chaos of production meant that Solo also lost its original villain. The late, great Michael K Williams was initially cast as antagonist Dryden Vos, and reference footage was shot of him in that role. When scheduling conflicts prevented Williams from returning to appear in Howard’s reshoots, the role was not only re-cast – Paul Bettany stepped in – but the entire character was retooled from a weird-sounding leonine creature to a regular humanoid (presumably because the latter was quicker to shoot). We never got to see Williams play an evil lion crime boss, and the world is surely the poorer for it.
Then again, chaos seems to shadow LucasFilm like the spectre in It Follows. The months building up to Rogue One: A Star Wars Story’s release in 2016 were clouded by reports of heavy reshoots, with the word being that screenwriter Tony Gilroy had essentially stepped in and shot as much as 40 percent of what is seen in the finished cut, including its ending. Original director Gareth Edwards remained classily silent about the whole situation, though it’s telling that it took seven years before he returned to directing with 2023’s The Creator.
With the soaring expense of making movies and intellectual properties being increasingly more valuable to studios than directors or stars, it’s perhaps unsurprising that extensive reshoots are so common. What’s slightly harder to fathom is why so many producers, having presumably picked a filmmaker because of their particular style or concept for a movie, are then disappointed or even horrified by the results. Lucasfilm hired Lord and Miller, known for their improv-heavy comedy, and were surprised when they started shooting Solo as an improv-heavy comedy.
Read more: 11 ramifications of Solo: A Star Wars Story’s box office performance
We may never know the truth of exactly what happened during the production of 2015’s Fantastic Four, but one thing that was clear even from the resulting movie is that director Josh Trank – then riding high on the success of 2012’s Chronicle – wanted to make a darker, body horror-infused version of the Marvel comics. Now, you can argue all day long whether that concept is right for the vibrant, gee-whiz spirit of Fantastic Four as envisioned by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, but Trank pitched it, Fox signed off on it, and the film went into production with that in mind. Then Fox executives got cold feet and ordered an extensive round of reshoots that completely shifted the tone of the film, or at least bits of it.
The result is a disjointed mess – such that it’s easy to tell the reshot footage from the original simply by looking at whether Kate Mara – as Sue Storm – is wearing an ill-fitting wig or not. Again, we may never know whether the film, as originally conceived by Trank, would have worked. But by retooling it so late, and so extensively, Fox potentially turned what was once at least a ‘morose’ (to quote one anonymous Fox executive) yet tonally coherent film into a jarringly incoherent one.
Part of the problem, it seems, comes from studio executives hiring a young director and then assuming they’ll be so excited for the opportunity that they’ll do as they’re told. A clear example was David Fincher, who in the early 90s was a successful commercials director keen to make his leap to feature filmmaking. Unfortunately for Fincher, his debut movie was Alien 3, which essentially began production without a finished script and descended further into a maelstrom of creative arguments and expensive reshoots from there. Given how badly the shoot went, it’s a testament to David Fincher’s eye as a filmmaker that the resulting movie is as fascinating (though flawed) as it is.
Even when a major film does have a seasoned director attached, that doesn’t mean it’s immune from trouble. Zack Snyder’s Justice League was marred by personal tragedy, but also a studio that suddenly decided it wanted to pivot away from the director’s grimdark tastes. And so, with Snyder out of the picture, Warner Bros roped in Joss Whedon to shoot lots of comedic (whether they were intended to be so or not) new sequences. Hence Henry Cavill’s strange, oft-lampooned CGI mouth.
Not that hefty reshoots are exclusively the preserve of Hollywood’s biggest franchises. In 2005, production company Morgan Creek gave Paul Schrader $30m to make an Exorcist prequel, didn’t like what they saw, shelved it, and gave Renny Harlin $50m to make another Exorcist prequel, Exorcist: The Beginning. (Schrader’s film eventually emerged as Dominion: Prequel To The Exorcist.
With a budget said to be in the range of $50m to $80m, Ballerina is itself a mid-priced film, at least compared to other heavily-reshot movies like Star Wars: The Force Awakens ($447m) or The Rise Of Skywalker ($416m). Only time will tell whether Ballerina’s reshoots are as extensive as claimed, or whether audiences will be able to detect the seam between its old and new sequences. Certainly, reshoots aren’t necessarily a bad thing – World War Z, according to most accounts, was improved by its reshot ending, for example, even if millions were spent on an entire wintry battle sequence that never saw the inside of a cinema.
Whatever happens to Ballerina, Lionsgate will no doubt be hoping for a movie whose financial and creative fortunes are more in line with Back To The Future’s than the ill-fitting wigs of Fantastic Four.
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