The original script for Ballerina was even more bloodthirsty than this year’s finished film, with a death count of over 1,400. We compare and contrast the two.
NB: The following contains spoilers for Ballerina’s 2017 spec script, but not for the film itself. As you’ll soon see, the two are rather different.
It’s around five in the morning when Ana de Armas storms an old people’s home. To the surf rock harmonies of Barbara Ann by The Beach Boys, the Knives Out star’s assassin lets the bullets fly, detonating superannuated heads and leaving some 200 bloodied corpses in her wake.
This, at least, would have been a standout scene from Ballerina had it stuck precisely to its original script, as written by Shay Hatten around eight years ago. In the context of Hatten’s story, the old folks’ home massacre is (marginally) less shocking: Armas’s trained killer has infiltrated a remote community populated by an entire cult of highly trained assassins. It’s a picturesque Alpine town with its own shops, church, school and, yes, retirement home.
The residents in the home may be in their 80s (all “wrinkled knees and liver spotted skin” as Hatten writes), but they’re all still a potential threat. One older gent even attacks the heroine with a set of personalised nunchucks.
All the same, it’s a startling moment in a script that is liberally sprinkled with near-the-knuckle violence. By the time its protagonist’s trail of vengeance is complete, she’s killed over 1,400 people – we know this because the script keeps providing us with an updated kill count, much like the YouTube channel, Movies To Be Murdered By.
Hatten was a 20-something graduate when he finished Ballerina in 2017; back then, it was a spec script with only a tenuous connection to the John Wick universe. Hatten saw the trailer for John Wick: Chapter 2, and was so struck by it that he decided to write his own ultra-stylised, ultra-violent action thriller, and Ballerina was the result.
His second spec script to appear on the Black List of unproduced screenplays (the first was Maximum King, about horror novelist Stephen King’s flailing attempt to direct his first and only feature film), Ballerina soon came to the attention of Lionsgate. The studio was so taken by the screenplay that, not only did they purchase it in 2017, but they also hired Hatten to work on the scripts for John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum and John Wick: Chapter 4.
By 2018, Lionsgate had hired Underworld and Die Hard 4.0 director Len Wiseman to turn Ballerina into a Wick spin-off – a ‘further adventures’ of a character Hatten wrote into John Wick: Chapter 3. As Wiseman recently told us, it was the Ballerina script’s central premise that attracted him and the film’s producers: that of a centuries-old ‘tribe’ of assassins living in an idyllic-looking Swiss enclave.
“I was working with Shay in 2018 and developing it into Ballerina,” Wiseman said. “And one of the things that I really connected to was the tribe that Shay had created, and there was an opportunity there to really expand on making that much more of a cult – different than other tribes that we’ve seen in John Wick… And I mean, as scripts do, they go through many iterations.”
Indeed, the first iteration of Ballerina was entirely different from the one making its debut in cinemas this month. This isn’t simply the case of changing a few names here and there, and maybe writing in a cameo for Keanu Reeves’ Wick – almost everything of note has changed barring its central premise.
Hatten’s original script for Ballerina introduces Rooney Brown, a young woman haunted by the violent murder of her father when she was a child. Already showing a precocious talent as a fighter, Rooney is signed up by a military contractor and trained as an assassin while still in her teens. By her early 20s, Rooney’s embarking on deadly missions all over the place – taking out terrorists in a Moscow restaurant; shooting neo-Nazis on a cruise ship.
When Rooney’s personal life is torn to shreds during an attempted hit, she follows the killers back to Switzerland, and the above-mentioned remote community, here called Sunnyvale. The action in Hatten’s script soon goes into overdrive, as Rooney begins shooting and fighting her way through the entire population – almost all of whom are heavily armed.
Written with its tongue firmly in its cheek, Ballerina’s action sequences are gleefully outlandish, the kill count rapidly climbing from the 28 mark around the middle of the script to over 200 by the start of the third act. The scene in the old folks’ home is joined by blood-soaked encounters in burger joints and bowling alleys, a face-off in a school that is thankfully less horrendously transgressive than it could have been, and a disquieting sequence involving a highway and a rocket launcher where the kill count rapidly breaches the 1,000 mark.
To put this into context, action films that were once thought deliriously violent, such as Rambo III and John Woo’s Hard Boiled, have a combined death toll of 434 according to Movie Body Counts. Ballerina’s final total of 1,408 slaughterings surpasses the number of people Milla Jovovich has killed across the course of her entire action career, according to this list on IMDb.
At some point during Ballerina’s adaptation into a John Wick movie, the action sequences described by Hatten were replaced or reimagined almost entirely, as was the idea of the onscreen kill count. The scenes of mayhem in the finished film are still plentiful – perhaps too plentiful, though we’ll get back to that subject shortly – but less wilfully button-pushing than those Hatten conceived eight years ago.
When asked about the sequence in the old people’s home, specifically, Wiseman said that it remained in later drafts of Ballerina “for a bit”, but by the sounds of things, was dropped at some point in ‘prep’, or pre-production.
“Oh my God,” Wiseman said when we brought the sequence up. “[It stayed] for a bit, because I thought it would just be really shocking. And how fun would that be? Yeah, it stayed in for [a while]. It never made it to prep. By the time we were in real prep, that [scene] was gone.”
Given the more outrageous moments in Hatten’s script – genital torture, a sex scene that borders on necrophilia – it’s a wonder whether it was written with the understanding that some of it would be too out-there to appear in a mainstream movie. Not so much a filmable screenplay as a calling card.
Wiseman, however, denies that this was the case. “Shay doesn’t think that way,” Wiseman said. “He’s, ‘It can get on film.’ It’s like, ‘Anything is possible.’”
Over the course of Ballerina’s long production, however, the story’s beats and tone changed considerably. Hatten remains the final cut’s credited writer, but a visit to the WGA’s website lists five other writers credited with “additional literary material (not on-screen)”: Len Wiseman, Rebecca Angelo, Lauren Schuker Blum, Michael Finch and Saltburn filmmaker Emerald Fennell.
Fennell was brought in by Ana de Armas, who signed up for Ballerina in 2022. “On Ballerina, it was important that I got a great script,” de Armas told Vanity Fair the year after she joined the production. “At the beginning, when I met with Len [Wiseman], I said, ‘We need a pass with a female writer,’ and that was great. What I liked about that is they heard what I said, and what I requested was done for all of our benefit. And now we’ve got a really cool script with a female touch and then Len’s side, which is also very smart.”
The rewrites did more than alter the tone of the violence, however. Hatten’s spec script gives its protagonist a love interest and several morsels of domestic bliss; Rooney is badly injured at one point – a bullet tears through her cheek, almost killing her. The scenes where her lover, Tom, nurtures Rooney as she recovers give the story a valuable hint of humanity.
In the finished film, Ana de Armas’s Eve, as she’s been renamed, is given no such escape from her bloody line of work. A member of the hermetic Ruska Roma crime family, she sleeps in an austere dorm and has few friends, much less a love interest.
(The meaning of Ballerina’s title also changes; in the first draft, it’s simply a reference to a music box which becomes a symbol for the protagonist’s trauma and rage. In the film, Eve has a music box, but is also trained as a literal ballerina – though her hard-earned skill as a dancer ultimately proves to be incidental to the plot.)
Another major story change may have come about due to Ballerina’s much-discussed post-production phase, in which the film was delayed for a year so that new sequences could be shot. Hatten’s initial draft introduces a character named Pine – a 20-something Sunnyvale resident who has plans of getting his wife and daughter away from the murderous cult. He’s a likeable figure, and becomes a useful ally for Rooney later in the plot (here, it’s Pine’s six year-old daughter who’s given the name Eve; in the final film, she’s called Ella).
Pine is also in the movie, and played by Walking Dead star Norman Reedus; his role in the story is suspiciously brief, however, which could suggest that his part was gradually reduced as the film travelled through production.
Wiseman has since talked about the speculation surrounding Ballerina’s post-production, in which stories emerged that John Wick director Chad Stahelski had been hired to essentially re-film large chunks of the movie. Wiseman denied this was the case, and said that he and Stahelski had instead collaborated on shooting additional sequences that had initially been dropped from the script due to budgetary constraints. This included a lengthy flashback in which we see the traumatic events from Eve’s youth – events that were, presumably, only spoken about in an earlier rough cut.
“The studio saw what we cut together – we shot it for a certain budget and schedule and everything… [and] there were things that we had to cut out of the original script,” Wiseman told us. “I really wanted to do Eve’s origin story, Eve as a young girl… And so once we saw the film and they [Lionsgate] loved it, [we said] ‘let’s go back and do some of those scenes that we didn’t have the schedule and time to do.’”
Amid all the writing and filming of new sequences, it’s arguable, however, that the more humanising moments in Hatten’s early draft were somehow mislaid. While his script is far from perfect – it descends into a numbing blur of violence in its final stretch – the first half does a solid job of making its heroine into a character who’s as likeable as she is brutally efficient. The supporting cast around her have recognisable sparks and quirks, which helps offset the sometimes withering quality of the bloodshed that occurs later.
The film in cinemas this month – now called From The World Of John Wick: Ballerina – still has its fair share of striking moments, particularly in the action department. There’s a particularly eye-popping and genuinely dangerous-looking flamethrower duel. Wiseman and his collaborators also find all sorts of creative uses for the humble hand grenade.
But in the lengthy process of welding the story to the John Wick franchise, with its secret societies, chain of hotels and ominous dialogue (“When you deal in blood, there must be rules!”), much of Hatten’s eccentricities have been sanded away. The retirement home massacres may be gone, but so too is its source’s go-for-broke streak of black comedy. Indeed, Ballerina offers a fascinating insight into much a script can change in its transition from page to screen, even as its core idea remains intact.
From The World Of John Wick: Ballerina is out in UK cinemas on the 6th June.
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