At USC film school, Ballarini wrote and directed the award-winning "pre-apocalyptic" film
Nuclear Family produced by
Michael Huffington. In 2002, Ballarini sold an original action comedy screenplay
The Spy Next Door to
Dimension Films for US $600,000. The following year he sold the script for a family adventure film titled
The Legendary McClouds to
Paramount Pictures with
Nickelodeon producing. He wrote a paranormal kids film
Spooks for Miramax as well as
The Blob for
Warner Bros. with
Jon Peters producing. In 2003, Ballarini directed a series of nationally broadcast
Honda Element commercials produced by
Daniel Dubiecki. In 2007, New Regency commissioned Ballarini to write a script for a biblical epic film,
The Nativity. The film premiered at the
South by Southwest Film Festival in 2008 and received positive reviews from critics. Film critic Todd Brown said of Ballarini's work on
Dance, "[It has] marked him as a talent to watch, someone with an unusual ability to balance tones and character and comedy to create something really quite special." In 2010, Warner Bros. began developing the
comic book series
Maintenance as a live-action feature film directed by
McG, for which Ballarini wrote the script. That same year, Ballarini co-wrote and directed the independent film
Father vs. Son, a
screwball comedy in which a father and his son fall in love with the same woman, which was produced by Michael Huffington. The film was also screened at the WorldFest-Houston International Film Festival, where it won best feature film debut. Later that year,
One Race Films hired Ballarini to write and direct episodes of
The Ropes, a television drama series about bouncers in
New York City produced by
Vin Diesel. Ballarini again teamed up with Gregg Bishop to write the script for
Lockdown at Franklin High on spec, which sold to
Sony Pictures Entertainment in March 2012 with
Michael Bay attached as a producer.
Lockdown is about two siblings who are trapped in their high school during a lockdown while a monster wanders the campus. He was also an uncredited writer for
Ice Age: Continental Drift, which was released in July 2012. In 2012, Joe Ballarini directed a short horror film about a clown visiting a man on his 35th birthday entitled
Buckles. In 2013, Ballarini directed
Caitlin Carmichael, Andrea Guttag, and Justin Welborn in another short horror film about a girl befriending the monster under her bed entitled
Bedbug.
New Line Cinema commissioned Ballarini to write a script for
Merlin, a then-untitled high concept action fantasy film set in medieval times.
20th Century Fox Animation began developing an animated version of the graphic novel
Cardboard in 2014 about a young boy and his father who must battle cardboard monsters that magically come to life, for which Ballarini wrote the adapted screenplay. In 2015,
Hasbro Studios announced its plans to release a theatrical
My Little Pony movie based on the television series
My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic by 2017, and Ballarini was brought on to write the script. Although Ballarini wasn’t involved in the film’s final writing stages, his comedic influence and style was able to make it into the film. Ballarini has been commissioned to write numerous other film and television scripts including
Turbo,
The Robot, and
Witchhunters. The story follows a teen girl searching for the child she was babysitting after the child is kidnapped by monsters.
Walden Media and
The Montecito Picture Company have bought movie rights to ''A Babysitter's Guide to Monsters''. The
film was released in 2020, with Ballarini writing the screenplay. ==Filmography==