The Continental: A Disappointing Spinoff That Damaged The John Wick Franchise

Mel Gibson headed up the cast of The Continental, a totally unnecessary TV spinoff from the John Wick movies, and completely failed the billion-dollar franchise. In recent years, we’ve been getting a lot of franchise spinoffs, because studios are nervous about investing in unproven original I.P., so they’ll greenlight any show with a tangential connection to something people already love, like an Office spinoff about the documentary crew’s next project.

There have been a lot of “unnecessary” spinoffs that “no one asked for” that turned out to be some of the best TV shows of the decade. No one wanted a Peacemaker show spun off from The Suicide Squad, but it ended up being a delightful surprise. No one wanted a Star Wars show about the guy who died at the end of Rogue One, but Andor wound up being maybe the greatest Star Wars thing ever created.

But these are the exceptions, not the rule. There are a lot more Secret Invasions than there are Cobra Kais — Cobra Kais don’t grow on trees. In 2023, Peacock released The Continental: From the World of John Wick, a three-part miniseries about the hotel John Wick stays at when he’s chasing bounties. It was unnecessary, no one asked for it, and it tarnished the good name of Wick.

The Continental Is A Black Mark On The John Wick Franchise

Just before The Continental premiered, the John Wick franchise was at an all-time high. We’d just seen John Wick: Chapter 4, the biggest, craziest, most thrilling John Wick movie yet, which brought the entire saga to a head and gave the character as perfect an ending as one could ask for.

For a decade, John Wick had been one of the most consistent action franchises out there. It’s extremely rare that an action movie series is still knocking it out of the park after four movies, but there were no bad John Wick movies, or even subpar John Wick movies. Each one was bigger and better than the last. And then, The Continental came along and swiftly ended that decade-long winning streak.

The series stars Mel Gibson as Cormac O’Connor, the guy who ran the New York Continental in the 1970s, and Colin Woodell as a young Winston. Making it a three-part miniseries was a baffling choice. It was too long to feel like a satisfying movie and too short to feel like a satisfying series, so it’s awkwardly stuck in limbo, somewhere in between.

The bottom line is that the assassin hotel didn’t need a backstory. The plucky revolutionary who did the dirty work and gave his life to get the Rebellion off the ground absolutely deserved his own backstory. But the Continental is just a cool piece of worldbuilding; it didn’t need a whole show of its own (especially one that could only eke out three episodes).

John Wick Bounced Back With Its Next Spinoff

Fortunately, after the disappointment of The Continental, the John Wick franchise was able to bounce back with its next spinoff. Ballerina stars Ana de Armas as Eve, a Ruska Roma assassin who travels to a sleepy European town to save a kidnapped child from a Resident Evil 4-style cult. It didn’t quite reach the heights of the John Wick movies, but it was a lot better than it had any right to be.

De Armas proved to be every bit the badass action hero that Keanu Reeves is, throwing herself into the physicality of each fight scene and nailing the underlying vulnerability of a broken person who kills for a living. The quest to save the abducted child keeps the plot refreshingly focused, and keeps the action scenes coming thick and fast.

Thanks to some wise reshoots with regular John Wick director Chad Stahelski, Ballerina has some of the most thrilling action sequences in the franchise. The flamethrower duel alone makes Ballerina worth the price of admission. The Continental was a huge let-down, but Ballerina saved the franchise.