‘John Wick Experience' Opens Doors In Las Vegas; First Photos Unveiled
Lionsgate and Egan Productions' immersive John Wick Experience is now open at Area15, which is located just off the Las Vegas Strip. If you want to know what it looks like inside, take a gander above and below.
John Wick filmmaker Chad Stahelski and his team at 87Eleven Entertainment were creative collaborators on the experience, from design to special stunt work. The fun spot is based on the billion-dollar Lionsgate franchise and counts more than a dozen themed rooms from the pics, as well as live interactions and interactive game play.
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Each group of guests passing through the John Wick Experience are tasked with completing a mission that plays out in unique ways with characters, mythology, and iconography inspired by the feature film universe. Visitors may rub elbows or grab a drink with John Wick Continental Las Vegas staff, assassins, crime bosses, or other curious guests like themselves The roughly 12,000-square-foot ticketed attraction includes two themed bars and a retail shop.
To bring audiences into the world of Wick, Lionsgate and Stahelski worked closely with Egan Productions, the producer of the experience. Egan is also Lionsgate's collaborator on two other Las Vegas attractions based on the studio's beloved IP: The Official SAW Escape, which opened in 2018 and was named Best Escape Room by USA Today, and Escape Blair Witch, which opened in 2021.
'In the films, Chad Stahelski has created a complex, alternate reality with exquisite design, deep mythological influence and meticulous action,' said Jenefer Brown, EVP & Head of Global Products and Experiences at Lionsgate. 'The most important part of creating this experience was honoring that and making sure that our guests truly feel like they are part of the world of the films. The experience delivers wholeheartedly on that promise, and we are excited to share it with fans.'
'The John Wick Experience drops you into the sleek, sophisticated world of The Las Vegas Continental,' said Jason Egan. 'This is the ultimate destination for anyone seeking a unique and captivating Vegas experience, and a must-visit for John Wick fans.'
The John Wick Experience is opening just months before the first John Wick spinoff movie, Ballerina, hits theaters June 6. There's also a second spinoff movie starring Donnie Yen in the works. In addition, Lionsgate is developing the series John Wick: Under the High Table, which Stahelski and Keanu Reeves are executive producing, and the studio has a John Wick AAA video game in the works. More info can be found at http://www.johnwickexperience.com.
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USA Today
an hour ago
- USA Today
In fiery 'Ballerina,' Ana de Armas is more than 'a female John Wick'
In fiery 'Ballerina,' Ana de Armas is more than 'a female John Wick' Show Caption Hide Caption 'Ballerina': Ana de Armas faces Keanu Reeves in 'John Wick' spinoff Ana de Armas plays a dancer-turned-assassin on a mission of revenge and Keanu Reeves makes an appearance as John Wick in the action movie "Ballerina." LAS VEGAS – Ana de Armas sobbed the first time she set a guy on fire. Her assassin character in the 'John Wick' franchise spinoff 'Ballerina' (in theaters June 6) uses all manner of weaponry when dealing with various villains, including a flamethrower. Before filming a rather fiery sequence, de Armas had a harrowing moment rehearsing with a stuntman where she felt the reality of the fiction they were creating. 'He's standing in front of me and I'm like, 'OK, easy. Just going to do it,' and, of course, he's performing,' de Armas recalls. 'But I dropped the thing and started crying because he is burning. It was not a good image. 'I had to unzip the (fireproof) onesie that they put on me and go for a walk. He came and showed me he was OK. But the first impression was really intense. I was not prepared for that. And then I burned like 106 people,' she adds with a proud smile. Join our Watch Party! Sign up to receive USA TODAY's movie and TV recommendations right in your inbox After "little tastes" of action in 'Ghosted' and 'The Gray Man,' plus one memorable sequence in the James Bond movie 'No Time to Die,' de Armas, 37, wanted more in her movie career. The Oscar-nominated actress got way more with 'Ballerina.' In the film, Eve Macarro (Ana de Armas) is brought up as a dancer and killer in the criminal Ruska Roma organization after the tragic death of her father when she was a child. Eve is unleashed on the underworld, but when she discovers the cult that killed her dad, she goes rogue on a violent mission of vengeance that ultimately puts her at odds with Wick (Keanu Reeves) himself. 'This is a character with a very strong conviction, or you could say also she's very stubborn,' de Armas says of Eve. 'Most of the movie's about revenge, but then in the end, there's a beautiful twist about trying to change someone else's life.' Franchise regular Ian McShane sees the addition of de Armas to the 'Wick' world as 'a gift. She's lovely, she's talented and she can act. What more can you ask?' And Reeves loves watching her 'be heroic' as Eve, like John, fights powers beyond her control. 'It's cool to see Ana have that opportunity to have the John Wick challenge of 'Against all odds!' and 'Another kind of revenge!' ' he says. However, it was extremely important to both de Armas and director Len Wiseman that Eve not be 'a female John Wick.' The filmmaker wanted her to be dynamic but also deal with the fact that de Armas isn't going to look unstoppable going up against, say, a 6-foot-3 assassin. 'We wanted to play the reality. Unless she's thinking more clever about how that fight unfolds, she is going to get her ass kicked,' Wiseman says. 'You see action movies where a female lead is just plowing through all these huge dudes, and me as an audience member just loving action, I go, 'Really?' So I was glad that Ana's like, 'Oh, no. Yeah, I should get thrashed.' ' That meant coming up with a signature style for Eve: In the Ruska Roma, she's taught to 'fight like a girl,' which means she needs to adapt, to improvise and to cheat. 'We thought about that line a lot, and it's like, are people going to take it right?' de Armas says. In creating the character's action choreography, de Armas leaned into her disadvantages. 'I wanted every kick and every punch, and every time I get slammed against the wall or whatever's happening, it hurts,' the actress said. 'She gets tired and she's overwhelmed and they keep coming at her. And the only thing that keeps her going is the motivation that she has.' But Eve is also extremely crafty and can make any object dangerous. She uses dinner plates, forks and candleholders in brawls, duct tapes a knife to a gun (so she can stab one bad guy while shooting another in the face) and, in the super-cool flamethrower faceoff, does damage with a firehose. (Which needed no extra practice, for the record. 'That I did on the spot on the day,' de Armas reports.) Wiseman came up with one of de Armas' favorite off-the-wall weapons: an ice skate that Eve sticks her hand in and uses like a boxing glove on an enemy. 'That could either be really lame and stupid or really cool and brutal,' the director says. The actress recalls the pitch: 'I was like, 'What did you just say?' ' she says with a laugh. 'It was really crazy when he thought of it, but then it all made sense. It's painful to even watch it.' De Armas 'never imagined' that her acting career was going to take this action-packed path, she says, and with 'Ballerina,' she got what she asked for – and more. 'After going through this, I was pretty satisfied.'
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
‘Ballerina' Review: Ana de Armas Kills Her Way Through a Solid Continuation of the John Wick Franchise
A serviceable addition to that most storied of sub-genres (action films about ballerina-assassins), Len Wiseman's 'Ballerina' is a movie that was ostensibly made to address a specific question that's been haunting the good people at Lionsgate since at least March of 2023: Can the 'John Wick' franchise survive without Keanu Reeves? In that light, perhaps the most encouraging thing I can say about the series' first proper spin-off is that it manages to answer that question — with an emphatic 'probably?' — despite searching for every excuse not to ask it in the first place. On the one hand, Keanu Reeves is very much in this movie, which is set in between the events of 'John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum' and 'John Wick: Chapter 4.' On the other hand, the actor's ornamental presence here emphasizes the extent to which his character had been subsumed into the ridiculously elaborate — and elaborately ridiculous — criminal underworld that he shot his way through; each of Wick's mass-murdering efforts to bring it down made it all the more obvious that the 'The High Table' is what ultimately keeps this franchise propped up. More from IndieWire 'Search Party' and 'Never Rarely Sometimes Always' Location Scout Makes Directorial Debut with Meta Indie 'The Scout' - Watch First Look Julianne Moore Talks About Being Drawn Into the 'Stakes' of 'Echo Valley' - and Expresses a Desire to Work with Wes Anderson With that in mind, perhaps the more pressing question that 'Ballerina' exists to put forward is this: Can the world of John Wick survive without series director Chad Stahelski? And… well, the movie doesn't really answer that either. In part, that's because Stahelski played a pivotal role in shaping the film's action sequences on set, even if rumors about the extent of his reshoots — and the deficiencies that supposedly demanded them — have been exaggerated. In the event those rumors have been exaggerated, then 'Ballerina' would prove that Stahelski's imprint on the franchise is strong enough that even a less skilled filmmaker like 'Live Free or Die Hard' director Wiseman is able to replicate it well enough to keep the franchise's spirit alive. And if nothing else, Wiseman certainly does that. 'Ballerina' might struggle to stay balanced on its toes as it strains to expand its pre-established universe at the same time as it introduces a new heroine to guide us through it, but all of the things that audiences have come to expect from the franchise are on full display in this spinoff. A million headshots at point-blank range? Check. Keanu Reeves putting both of his lungs into every one of his lines? Of course. Wacky subtitles that make the mere act of reading feel like it's freighted with cartoon violence? You know it. While there are several aspects of 'Ballerina' that feel a lot shakier than anything did in the series' previous films (most of them having to do with the introduction and motivation of Ana de Armas' en pointe assassin), 'Ballerina' stands tall where it counts. That's not only because Shay Hatten's Black List script has been successfully retrofitted to feel like it belongs to the world of John Wick, or because the watered down fight scenes of the movie's first half eventually give way to some of the franchise's most inspired carnage so far, but also because the best of that carnage — all of it rooted in 87 Eleven Entertainment's signature blend of close-up gun-fu — bends over backwards to accommodate a 5'6' actress who weighs less than Keanu Reeves' paycheck. The only survivor of a dull prologue that sees her adoptive father massacred by a shadowy figure named the Chancellor (an imperious Gabriel Byrne), young Eve Macarro is rescued from the ashes by New York hotelier Winston Scott (McShane), and delivered into the care of Anjelica Huston's cigar-chomping Director, who runs a ballet studio so hardcore that it makes 'Black Swan' look like 'Bunheads.' In addition to pliés and pirouettes, Eve is trained in the art of shooting people in the face, and by the time the action picks up 11 years into her studies, she's itching to graduate from the Ruska Roma conservatory and get out into the field. After all, she's never going to find the men who killed her dad if she just stays inside doing montages all day. What's interesting about Eve, at least in theory, is that she's determined to be accepted into the same criminal underworld that John Wick is hellbent to escape, and 'Ballerina' does its best to make the most of that friction in the rare instances when those two characters happen to cross paths. Alas, that only accounts for a few minutes of the movie's runtime, and de Armas — deprived the immediacy of the grief that fueled Reeves' performance in the franchise's humble first installment — isn't given a strong enough foundation to meaningfully support her need for revenge. She's anxious and unsure where John Wick is Zen-like and resigned, but her lines have no heft, her character has no humor, and her bloodlust has no believable emotionality behind it. That proves to be a problem for the worldbuilding around her; where John Wick's mission made him a natural tour guide through the underworld, Eve Maccaro can't help but feel like more of a tourist by comparison, and so we glimpse at the inner workings of the Rusko Roma without really getting a meaningful sense of place. The good news is that 'Ballerina' has another place it wants to show us, and that place turns out to be a wonderful addition to this franchise's ever-swelling cinematic universe. Informed that the Chancellor is somewhere near Prague, Eve goes rogue by violating the Ruska Roma's orders, flying across the Atlantic, and killing her way closer to her target. A brief encounter with a bedraggled Norman Reedus fails to register (the 'Death Stranding' actor shows up for just long enough to overcomplicate the plot), but things pick up in a hurry once Eve is pointed in the direction of an idyllic Austrian village called Hallstatt — a real place, beautifully wedged between a still lake and some glorious Alpine mountains — that 'Ballerina' John Wickifies into a cultish refuge for ex-assassins who want to create life instead of ending it. It's the perfect setup for this franchise to go full 'Hot Fuzz' when the shit hits the fan in the third act. And so 'Ballerina' halfheartedly pivots into a story that kinda sorta weighs family against fate, and — better yet — transitions into a movie where Ana De Armas smashes the same woman over the head with 20 different plates, invents a dozen new ways to absolutely obliterate people with grenades, and turns a pair of figure skates into a swinging pair of nunchakus that give new meaning to the double loop salchow. Eve's background as a dancer weirdly doesn't factor into the action in quite the same way (the ballerina of it all doesn't extend much beyond a few cues from 'Swan Lake,' or the same cue 10 different times), but that doesn't mean the movie treats her like a plug-and-play John Wick stand-in. On the contrary, its ultra-violence is reliably at its best whenever the blocking embraces de Armas' differences. 'Change the terms,' a Ruska Roma instructor tells Eve at the start of a film that's clearly hedging its bets. 'Lean into your strengths, not his.' She's talking about Eve's opponent, but the sentiment applies just as neatly to John Wick, whose stoicism turned every shootout into a war of wills. Eve doesn't have quite the same inner strength, and so she's forced to look for outside help. Read: She has to use her environment to fuck people up. And she does. She really does. The prop work never aspires to Jackie Chan levels of comic mayhem, but — with the help of stunt double and trainer Cara Marie Chooljian — de Armas uses every resource at her disposal to become a convincingly dangerous tornado of death. The third act finds Eve taking such eager advantage of the world around her that it feels like she's compensating for the first half of the movie's failure to do the same. Perhaps there will be time for that later. At its core, 'Ballerina' is a film about a bright-eyed newcomer asking a jaded legend for some career advice, only for John Wick to tell Eve to do something else with her life. But she obviously doesn't want to heed that warning, and by the time Eve kills her way to the end credits of this spinoff, I didn't want her to either. A bigger, more confident sequel might be just what this franchise needs to enjoy a peaceful transition of power — and to make good on the full potential of a Hollywood action movie that meaningfully tries to iterate on John Wick instead of just copying his moves. Lionsgate will release 'Ballerina' in theaters on Friday, June 6. Want to stay up to date on IndieWire's film and critical thoughts? to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings — all only available to subscribers. Best of IndieWire The 25 Best Alfred Hitchcock Movies, Ranked Every IndieWire TV Review from 2020, Ranked by Grade from Best to Worst
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Jennifer Lopez Is a Silver Screen Diva in Kiss of the Spider Woman Teaser Trailer
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