Why Sequels, Franchises, and Cinematic Universes Have Won in Cinema

The next film from the so-called Marvel Comics Cinematic Universe, Deadpool and Wolverine, was released - as the title suggests, it is about the adventures of Marvel superheroes Deadpool and Wolverine. Looking at the film calendar for 2024, it is easy to see that all the major premieres of the year are sequels, prequels, remakes, crossovers and films from film franchises and film series. In other words, endless variations of well-known stories.

In August, we will see the seventh Alien film and the remake of The Crow, and in September, the remake of the classic black comedy Beetlejuice by Tim Burton. In October, we will release a sequel to The Joker, which was a big hit five years ago, another Transformers film, this time animated, and the third Venom film. The year ends with the December premiere of Gladiator by Ridley Scott, who also directed the sequel to his hit film.

Cable TV Versus Cinemas

The last decade began with an avalanche of bad and very bad remakes of a dozen Hollywood hits of the eighties. These are new versions of A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010), The Thing and Conan the Barbarian (2011), Total Recall (2012), Carrie (2013), RoboCop (2014), Breaking Bad and Poltergeist (2015), Ghostbusters (2016), Flatliners (2017), Overboard (2018), and so on. Panned by both audiences and critics, these films, with rare exceptions, still brought in good box office for the studios.

The wave of remakes of the decade was a response to the success of new generation TV series on cable television. As you know, the TV revolution began with The Sopranos (1999), a series that turned soap into not only an art form but also a national cultural phenomenon. It turned out that cable TV series are more interesting to watch than cinema films.

While the big studios were removing everything truly original, bold and controversial from their film productions to make the film appeal to as many viewers as possible, TV producers were imposing their own rules of the game on viewers. They complicated the drama of the series, and made the characters in the series more and more deeply developed and ambiguous. And, of course, there was no censorship or taboo topics on TV. Moreover, the creators of the series seemed to provoke viewers by raising the most controversial topics in culture, politics and public life.

Also, under the influence of TV series, films divided into several parts began to be released, for example, sequels to the Wachowski brothers' biggest hit, The Matrix: Reloaded and The Matrix: Revolution, and Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill dilogy (both released in 2003-2004). Let's not forget about the February premiere of the second part of Dune (2023-2024) by Denis Villeneuve, who is one of the few top directors who does not dislike sequels to other people's films.

Remakes Continue and Lose

Hollywood did not respond with a wave of remakes from scratch. Firstly, a remake of the original King Kong (2005) by Peter Jackson, director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, became a big box office hit. Secondly, in 2006, one of the longest-running film franchises (currently in its 28th film), the James Bond adventures, was relaunched.

Both films were a reinterpretation of the old story, with Agent 007 receiving a particularly radical revision. The action-adventure film turned into a drama, and the ironic superman turned into an ordinary person who can make mistakes, experience doubts and pain. But the rest of the attempts to tell old stories in a new way failed. The audience did not like the fact that Freddy Krueger turned out to be a paedophile, and the frustrated and suffering RoboCop did not evoke sympathy either. And the quality of the films themselves was worse than the originals.

The fact is that the original films of the seventies and eighties were made not just by solid professionals like John Guillermin (King Kong 1976), Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters) or Garry Marshall (Overboard). But also innovative directors such as John Carpenter (The Thing), Brian De Palma (Mission: Impossible) or Paul Verhoeven (RoboCop).

Most modern remakes have been the work of either remake directors like Marcus Nispel or newcomers to Hollywood like music video maker Samuel Bayer or expats like Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. and Jose Padilha, who have no experience of resisting the studio system (which the directors of the seventies and eighties were good at).

Superhero Film Universes Have Won

The experience of the James Bond film series and the Star Wars epic has shown that the longer a film franchise is, the more money it brings in. Even if in the short term one of the films in the series did not become a big box office hit, you can always restart the project with a new team. Or you can master a new format, like the Star Wars film village, where TV series are shot in parallel with theatrical films.

And then graphic novel publishers, who have the rights to superheroes, entered the scene. This gave them virtually unlimited resources to create a whole series of films that would become known as the "cinematic universes" of Marvel Comics and DC Comics.

And although it was not Marvel but their long-time competitors DC Comics (Superman in 1978 and Batman in 1989) who made the breakthrough of superhero movies into cinemas, it was Marvel who invented the successful formula of a cinematic universe united by common superheroes who roam from film to film. Since 2008, 33 films have been released as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, bringing their creators more than $30 billion. In fact, Deadpool and Wolverine is the 34th film in a row.

DC Comics launched its own analogue only in 2013, having released 16 films to date, the most popular of which was Aquaman (2018), which grossed $1 billion 150 million. For comparison, Marvel's biggest box office hit, Avengers: Endgame" (2019) brought in almost twice as much - $2 billion 900 million.

According to psychologists, viewers prefer famous heroes and familiar stories because they give a sense of security and stability. Our psyche is designed in such a way that new information is always perceived as harder than the information we have already learned. And this is also one of the reasons why Hollywood is endlessly filming countless sequels, prequels and new series of successful film franchises or restarting them anew - as long as they bring in money, of course.

It is for this reason that actor Robert Downey Jr. is returning to the Marvel film series, whose Iron Man from the 2008 film of the same name symbolises Marvel's success at the box office (although he promised not to). Nostalgia is a very comfortable feeling, which is an additional factor in success. And this is neither good nor bad in itself, it's just how the industry works. Ultimately, the choice is up to the filmgoer, who pays for this whole banquet.