The reason John Wick works is because it never promised more than blood, silence, and style — and delivered all three like a bullet to the head.

That’s what makes Ballerina, the upcoming Ana de Armas-led spin-off, such a risk.

Set between John Wick: Chapter 3 and Chapter 4, it follows Rooney, a ballerina-assassin out for revenge against the people who murdered her family. A simple setup. A familiar rhythm. But maybe too familiar.

Because John Wick isn’t a universe. It’s a mood.

It’s not mythology. It’s momentum.

What made the original film so electric wasn’t world-building — it was world-suggesting. We caught glimpses of an underground economy, cryptic rules, and crimson-lit corridors where death was bartered like currency. But none of it slowed down to explain. It was all texture, never textbook.

Wick kills. Wick reloads. Wick walks away.

That’s the spell. And it worked, again and again.

But Ballerina pulls at that thread. It asks: what if we step away from Wick and focus on the world he tried to leave behind?

It’s a gamble.

Franchise thinking says: spin it off, scale it out, give every side character a saga. But John Wick was never supposed to be scalable. It was elegant in its constraint. A man, a dog, a gun. That’s all it took.

Add too much — backstory, exposition, lore — and the whole thing starts to wobble.

Even Chapter 4, for all its grandeur, skirted the edge of overreach. What saved it was clarity: John Wick was still at the center.

Now we get a new lead, a new motive, and possibly, a new tone.

Ana de Armas has chops. That isn’t the question.

The question is whether we want to know more about the world John Wick walked through — or whether the power was in not knowing.

The danger isn’t failure. It’s forgettability.

Wick never needed to be explained. He needed to be felt. His story had weight because it was lean, not layered.

Ballerina may work. It may stun. It may carve out its own brutal ballet. But every time the Wick-verse stretches, it risks snapping what held it together in the first place.

Cool is hard to maintain.

And mystery doesn’t get sequels.

I know that people used to die in the movies. I’ve seen it.

In Jaws, the shark bit Quint in half. There was no getting him back. Just a final scream, some crushed ribs, and a bellyful of gristle for the great white. It was final. It was brutal. It was the movies.

But that was then.

Now? Quint’s probably getting his own prequel series. A gritty reimagining of his years aboard the USS Indianapolis, starring some Chris or Hemsworth or hybrid of both. Death doesn’t end stories anymore—it greenlights them.

Dying, in Hollywood, has become non-lethal.

You can blame—or credit—any number of sources. The resurrection of Spock in Star Trek III. The never-ending murders of Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, and Michael Myers. James Bond, blown to bits in one film and sipping a martini in the next.

Don’t get me started on superheroes. Dying is just part of their training montage. And with a handy multiverse, even the past need not be a nuisance.

Once, character death meant something. It was punctuation. A period. A warning that the stakes were real and the story mattered. Now it’s a comma. Or a mid-credit scene.

The shift started subtly. Serial heroes like Tarzan and Zorro in the 1930s never aged, never bled, never lost. But they weren’t killed and brought back—they simply never died.

That changed in the blockbuster era, when audiences began to accept, even expect, that no matter what happened, a franchise could retool itself.

Studios noticed. They had no reason not to. When killing off Superman in the comics sold millions, they saw something profound: death doesn’t end narrative—it extends it. It sells T-shirts. It creates buzz. It gives you a chance to “go darker” in the next one.

That’s when death stopped being a plot point and became a marketing strategy.

And maybe that’s the real change: we’ve stopped mourning our favorite characters because we know they’re not really gone. They’re on a break. Doing yoga between trilogies. Waiting for the next reboot, spinoff, or timeline retooling.

It’s not just that Hollywood doesn’t believe in death. It doesn’t need it. Not when you can resurrect anything with CGI, a new actor, or a well-funded nostalgia campaign.

So yes, people still die in the movies. But only the extras. Only the ones without merchandise.

Quint? He didn’t die. He just hasn’t been retooled yet.

And when he does return, I bet he’s got a revenge story. And streaming residuals.

Netflix’s Fred and Rose West: A British Horror Story is the latest entry in the streaming service’s polished true-crime catalog, and like so many before it, it draws you in with careful craft and a sense of moral purpose—only to leave you with the queasy sense that something’s missing.

The series is stark, methodical, and thankfully avoids the genre’s worst instincts. There are no cheap dramatizations, no ominous reenactments, no gothic voiceovers trying to outdo the horror.

Instead, it leans on archival news footage, survivor testimony, and newly unearthed police recordings. These tools make the story feel chillingly immediate. For those unfamiliar with the case, it’s shocking. For those who know it well, it still unsettles.

But what British Horror Story gains in tone, it loses in shape. The pacing feels off, as if the filmmakers couldn’t decide whether to create a portrait of evil or a procedural of how it was uncovered.

The result is a story that feels suspended in midair—gripping while it plays, but evaporating the moment it ends.

Worse, it omits major players like Anne Marie Davis, Fred West’s daughter and a central witness in Rose’s prosecution. The documentary never mentions her, a baffling gap that undercuts its claim to telling the full story. It also closes without context—no text, no follow-ups, no “where are they now” summation. The series doesn’t so much end as stop.

There’s power in restraint, yes. But not in absence. And this case—like all serial murder cases—is as much about survival and aftermath as it is about horror.

Fred and Rose West succeeds in bringing dignity to the victims and restraint to the genre. But its refusal to fully close the circle robs it of the resolution its viewers, and its subjects, deserve. It’s a good documentary. It just needed to be great.