The Continental Is The Weak Link In A Perfect 12-Year Franchise

3-Part Action Thriller Is The Weak Link In A Near-Perfect 12-Year Franchise

While one action thriller movie franchise has long managed to provide viewers with some of the strongest titles in the genre for over a decade, its only small-screen spinoff was a letdown in comparison. Shakycam is dead, and its murderer is easily identified. Ever since Keanu Reeves’ implacable unstoppable assassin John Wick first entered cinemas in 2014, any interest in the rapid cutting and close-ups pioneered by The Bourne Supremacy’s Paul Greengrass has vanished in favor of the super-slick stylings of John Wick director Chad Stahelski’s work.

Stahelski and John Wick producer David Leitch popularized ‘Gun Fu,’ a smooth, slick style of action filmmaking that was carried over into not just the John Wick sequels, but also Atomic Blonde, the Deadpool movies, Bullet Train, Birds of Prey, the Nobody franchise, Love Hurts, Kate, and the Violent Night series. Outside of Stahelski and Leitch’s productions, everything from 2022’s Oscar-winning hit Everything Everywhere All at Once to the killer ballerina thriller Pretty Lethal has borrowed this now-ubiquitous style.

Fortunately, the pair have been able to benefit from this success as the original John Wick series itself went from strength to strength with each new theatrical outing. While the original movie made an impressive $86 million on a budget of around $25 million, each subsequent sequel made more than the last, with the franchise’s critical reception improving with each new movie in tandem. Sadly, this does mean that the one-season small-screen spinoff, The Continental: From the World of John Wick, is the franchise’s one true letdown.

The Continental Is The John Wick Franchise's Only Real Miss

Admittedly, 2025’s spinoff movie From the World of John Wick: Ballerina underperformed at the box office, earning only $140 million on a budget of around $90 million. However, that Ana de Armas vehicle was well-liked by critics, earning mostly positive reviews despite its underwhelming financial reception. In contrast, The Continental: From the World of John Wick got a much more muted reception upon its 2023 release.

Both a prequel and spinoff series, The Continental: From the World of John Wick follows the story of Colin Woodell’s Winston Scott, a Scottish American entrepreneur who sets up New York’s titular hotel, a safe haven for hitmen. As viewers of the movies know, the Continental is one of the few settings in the John Wick franchise’s universe wherein no blood can be shed, making the hotel a rare site of respite for assassins.

Set in the 1970s, The Continental: From the World of John Wick focuses on Woodell’s younger version of Ian McShane’s John Wick character as he comes into contact with Mel Gibson’s Cormac O’Connor, the original proprietor of the eponymous hotel. Hubert Point-Du Jour, Mishel Prada, and Jessica Allain round out the supporting cast, alongside guest stars like Zainab Jah, Mark Musashi, Marina Mazepa, and Katie McGrath. However, while it is fun to see the star of BBC’s underrated Merlin playing the porcelain-masked villainess the Adjudicator, the show’s attempts to bring John Wick’s world to the small screen largely fall flat.

The Continental's Great Premise Deserved Better Execution

There’s a good reason that the franchise’s first small screen spinoff wasn’t simply titled The Continental. The world of the John Wick series is famously immersive and detailed, feeling lived-in in a way that is common for fantasy and sci-fi franchises, but rare for action movies. The movies in the series hint at an entire colorful history dotted with larger-than-life characters, but because their plot is limited to focusing on Keanu Reeves’ title character, these glimpses always remain just that.

Thus, in much the same way that The Rings of Power promised to bring Tolkien’s lore to life after The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies focused on only two stories within these universes, The Continental: From the World of John Wick and From the World of John Wick: Ballerina were intended to expand on the mythos of the movie series. The show, in particular, with its longer runtime and broader scope, looked like a perfect chance to build out and expand the world of the series.

To be fair, The Continental: From the World of John Wick was not short on lore. The issue was that, without the brisk runtime and big budget of the movies, the show couldn’t avoid feeling both cheaper and slower than its multiplex predecessors. Much like Dune’s HBO Max prequel Dune: Legacy, which earned similarly mixed reviews, this prequel was a reminder that sometimes, more lore isn’t enough to justify a spinoff.

Not only was Gibson badly miscast in a major role, but The Continental: From the World of John Wick also struggled with the legacy of its predecessors. If the show was just another action TV series like Reacher or Gangs of London, the spinoff’s fight sequences might have been lauded as some of the best on the small screen. However, the series was instead inevitably compared to the John Wick movies, and fell short of the absurdly high standard they set.

John Wick's Ballerina Spinoff Is Underrated

The other issue with The Continental: From the World of John Wick is one that earlier TV show spinoffs of franchises have mostly avoided, as evidenced by the success of Highlander: The Series. The Continental: From the World of John Wick needed to choose one main character as its protagonist and focus on them, but the show instead became distracted by its many outlandish villains and often sidelined its underwhelming hero.

This is where From the World of John Wick: Ballerina outdid its small-screen competitor. While it may have struggled at the box office, the spinoff fared better with critics than The Continental: From the World of John Wick, in large part because it had a compelling central heroine to focus on. Even the most hard-hearted veteran of the action thriller genre could not help but get invested in the story of De Armas’s ballerina turned assassin planning epic revenge on her father’s killers.

In contrast, the story of how the Continental hotel became a safe haven for assassins simply didn’t have the same personal stakes. While a solid action show and worth a watch for fans of the John Wick movies, The Continental: From the World of John Wick was sadly not the crossover success that it should have been.