While IMDBing Sin City just now I saw that Sin City 2 is in production. This in turn got me thinking about sequels, and prequels .
With the epic movies like Lord of the Rings which illustrated just how lucrative the trilogy approach can be, we began to see an emergence of more high budget movies. Movies in the form of the Spiderman’s the X-men’s, Fast and the Furious, Harry Potter, etc. It seems then, that we’ve become increasingly in tune with ways to make money, and as such are headed to a new sort of mainstream cinema. One comparable to tv in the sense that there are now ‘episodes’ (harry potter would be the best example here). So long as the money is there… so will be the next installment it seems.
Mainstream, Big Budget movies seem to bide their time as the laughing stock of many jokes as there was a bunch of money spent and no monetary result. But now the money --by it’s definition-- is doing what it always does, getting better.
I wonder what the future will have in store for film in general? Is this trend a fluxation, or an ascending intricacy in the marketing Goliath?
Remember the ‘Olden Days’ when movie-sets had to be built by hand, with hammers and nails ?
… and the cost of putting such vast constructions in ‘cold storage’, while waiting for a possible
sequel to get the green light ?
I think now all you need is a few green curtains, and a couple of hard-drives.
Don’t think so what? I’m not trying to prove anything here… just pointing out this trend of episodic trend, and how lucrative it is. Things like Spiderman – these are billion dollar franchises.
James Bond, in my mind, were the first movies which really took advantage of this approach. Sex, beautiful women, explosions, cool gadgets.
But with this structured system now, we find a loss of creativity due to various economical wrinklings which take place behind the scenes. Things like… having a different director, or… not being able to book the original star from the first movie (Batman). It’s like “Come on people, we -know- if we can put this movie together it will sell, we just have to do it”. There is a declination from artsy scripts on the fence, to sequel they know will either do fairly well or quite good.
Sorry, Old_Gobbo, if I have muddied the waters of this thread, I’ve read it again a couple of times just now and to be honest, they appear to have been a little bit muddy right from the start.
Or maybe I’m just a little bit thick… I dunno.
I don’t really have any major disagreement, to be honest. However, I do have a point of view on the topic… The way I see it, is that, it has only been in the last ten years or so, that it has actually become technologically possible to bring the ‘back-catalogue’ of popular ‘fantastical’ fiction to the silver screen.
This trend, no doubt, will continue until this ‘back-catalogue’, of episodic comic-books in particular, has been exhausted.
There will be no exhausting it nearly any time soon. With a good portion of all films being made today being remakes of old themes, I really don’t think that repetition is a problem.
Look at Harry Potter as well. The back catalogue is just as much the front.
The common element here is kids. They go hand-in-hand with visually appealing stuff.
On the contrary, the strategy is that as opposed to wasting money on low budget productions that may or may not make money, and none of which are at all likely to become a blockbuster and therefore make back your entire movie making budget, that expensive movies are a more guaranteed way of ensuring attendances. People will go to see a movie purely because it is the most expensive ever made. Not because a big budget is a guarantee of quality (e.g. the last 2 star wars movies, the third Matrix movie, Waterworld), but because one has to see what 200 million dollars looks like on a cinema screen. Artistically, ‘the biggest budget ever’ translates to ‘something I’ve never seen before’. In a quite literal sense this is true: until one has seen a 200 million dollar movie one hasn’t seen a 200 million dollar movie.
Exactly, kids, and stupid people, with too much money, who’ve just “GOT TO HAVE” that new DVD Box Set.
DVD Box Set’s…?
I wonder if that has anything to do with it… Or maybe just DVD’s in general.
Well why didn’t you say that before ?
Now, I see what you mean. You actually make it sound like a ‘fireworks display’, the dumbest of all mass entertainment shows. I think they promote such displays in that way. How much they spent. How much they weigh.
Another thought — BRAGGING RIGHTS… for your typical movie-nerd, in the days before video and DVD, involved the telling to your mates that you "…saw Star Wars like 50 times man!! "
Maybe the Movie Industry are applying the lessons learned by toy companies… think Pokemon.
" That’s right kids, you can now hold, in your own little hands, the COMPLETE SET of Spy Kids 1,2 and 3. Watch’em any time you like, show’em off to your friends."
I think sequels are natural and logical for films. Why discard good characters after just two hours? Of course there are bad sequels just like there are bad films, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with sequels in and of themselves.
Of course, the LotR films aren’t exactly ‘sequels’- no part of the the trilogy was meant to stand completely alone. They were designed from the outset as one story broken into three more manageable chunks.
Some stories would greatly benefit from such treatment, although it wouldn’t always be commercially viable. One example is the atrocious film “Queen of the Damned.” It pretty much sucked on every level, but my brother informed me they condensed two huge books into one 90 minute movie! How can you hope to distill 1,000 pages into an hour and a half?
Anne Rice basically sucks as an author- I just use that as an example.
I don’t actually read fiction at all myself, but I’d imagine it would depend a lot on what percentage of those 1,000 pages was ‘spoken’ dialogue. Everything else can be condensed into pictures, and as the old saying goes, “A picture is worth…”
I think Rice’s writing sucks. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but vast tracts of very important plot developement apparently was omitted. Along with a lot of dialog, I imagine. Oh, well- movies are rarely as good as books. A book typically delves into the characters at much greater length and to a greater degree of depth than a film, especially the films of today.
I will have to admit I’ve never actually read any Tolkien. So I can’t really compare the movies to the books, but I loved the movies.
… 
How can you hope to distill 1,000 pages into an hour and a half?
So I can’t really compare the movies to the books, but I loved the movies.