Tracking methods
Tracking a Spinoff That Shares a Timeline With the Main Series
Updated Sep 28, 2026
A spinoff that happens during the main series, not after it, breaks the simplest tracking habit a household has: adding new entries to the end of a watchlist in the order they're released.
A spinoff with a specific slot
John Wick (2014) and John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum (2019) are two entries in a numbered main line most households track in release order without a second thought. Ballerina (2025) breaks that pattern on purpose — its own story is set between Chapter 3 and Chapter 4, not after either.
Two defensible ways to log it
A tracker can log Ballerina by release date (after Chapter 4, since that's when it came out) or by story date (between Chapters 3 and 4, since that's when it happens). Neither is a tracking mistake — they're two different questions a watch history can answer, and a household should pick one on purpose rather than end up with half the titles logged one way and half the other.
Why this is worth deciding explicitly
Left undecided, this is exactly the kind of small inconsistency that makes a shared watch history feel unreliable months later, when someone asks "did we watch Ballerina before or after Chapter 4?" and the log doesn't make it obvious which order was meant.
Check the guide before you log it
The John Wick Watch Order states Ballerina's timeline placement explicitly, so a household can decide its own logging rule once instead of re-deriving it from memory every time a new entry lands mid-timeline.