Roll the dice enough and a few winners are bound to pop up by chance.
X-Men film series
While the future of this series, responsible for setting the
superhero boom of the modern era into motion, is officially up in the air with
its recent acquisition by their competition at Disney and inevitable
reintegration into the setting of their parent company, Marvel, the “X-Men”
Film series has made remarkable strides in the last few years that make the
abrupt upheaval and potential close of its run more than a little bit tragic.
It’s a franchise steeped in a legacy whose ramifications can
still be seen in almost every superhero movie released over the last decade or
so and it may not have a stainless track record but that may very well be key
to what helped it to mutate, evolve and endure similar to the emerging species
of which its namesake belongs to.
As the “X-Men” series had begun to run its original course,
with the critical tanking of its third installment and first Wolverine solo
spinoff, it found itself unfortunately written into a corner that it could only
worm its way out of by soft rebooting with 2011’s “X-Men: First Class.”
While Twentieth Century Fox ultimately managed to
reinvigorate the franchise with a succession of entries using continuity in
broad strokes to thematically tie things up and reposition the franchise for
higher creative potential, the chances taken on them along with the success of
the R-rated, comically focused, and highly experimental “Deadpool” incentivized
them down a path of genre experimentation that brought them higher critical
acclaim, financial success, and full maximization of their concepts potential,
which has always bumped up against the ceiling of the broader Marvel Universe.
In short, by using mainstream “X-Men” entries to bolster
their finances, Fox, accidentally or otherwise, has essentially managed to
capitalize on the “X-Men” franchise by enhancing focus on its science fiction
concept to create a series that exists as a testing ground for new ideas within
the superhero genre, shaking up the very foundation of what we would commonly consider
to be superhero films. Although cohesion was sacrificed for this, it has yet to
be done in the name of actual quality as the only superhero movie potentially
threatening to topple “Logan” in terms of quality is the one bringing together
10 years worth of introduced cinematic superheroes.
At a time when DC faced its own struggle, the only real
competition Marvel face was from Fox’s handling of a property that they didn’t
even own.
Legendary Monsterverse
With 2 decently received movies released to the public and
successfully reviving interest in Godzilla overseas, the coming showdown
between Kong and the King of Monsters looms ever closer and while the immediate
financial success of the film has only been rather modest, its fittingly modest
presentation may have helped it to sustain its decent level of support and
prevented it from slipping into the territory of more cynical expectations.
Time will tell whether this franchise can keep its ambitions
in check long enough to complete their short term plan, as well as whether or
not the license will be extended beyond 2020 but for now, “Godzilla (2014)” and
“Kong: Skull Island” have set this franchise on a path that seems to recognize
that the worth of a cinematic universe is in the sum of its individual parts
rather than convoluted metanarrative rendering single installments as
commercials for commercials.
While the Kaiju genre, running the gamut of clever thought
provoking socially aware films to dumb fun popcorn blockbusters, has always had
a history of being able to produce functional sequels on the flimsiest of
premises, it no doubt helps that the genre that essentially characterizes
anthropomorphic natural disasters doesn’t exactly require the level of sequel
baiting that tends to sink other movies attempting to build up to a grander
spectacle.
All that the films of the “Monsterverse” have had to do is
tell a self contained story that doesn’t destroy the monster and the sky is the
limit on what they can do with subsequent movies, like a big budgeted and less
forced version of a slasher movie.
The Conjuring franchise
Perhaps referring to this as a “universe” is a bit of an overstatement
but there’s no denying that despite leaving behind any veneer of truth in favor
of embracing the fictionalized Warrens as folk heroes, “The Conjuring” has left
a surprising mark on the Hollywood landscape by providing a series of fairly
high quality horror films sharing something of a definitive pathos that thus
far seems to exist more for the sake of enriching the setting of subsequent
movies rather than stringing the audience along with randomly generated plot
threads.
The system of having the main series following the exorcisms
of Ed and Loraine surrounded by minor spinoffs based around antagonistic
spirits has managed to finally hit a proper stride on both ends with the
surprise hit of “Annabelle: Creation” and even though the franchise seems to
rather quaint compared to its many competitors on the Cinematic Universe scene,
its grasp of the fundamentals of selling people on good movies rather than a
continuing franchise perhaps best epitomizes just about everything that has
gone wrong with other examples.
The concept may be malleable to the needs of individual film
genres but ultimately, the only organic way to develop a Cinematic Universe is
to let it come into being naturally.
Ignoring that the “Marvel Cinematic Universe” didn’t confirm
its setting was building to a crossover of radically opposing elements until 3
years and 4 movies in, what we ultimately have in sampling from other examples
that have managed to thus far succeed is proof that the promise of crossover is
simply no substitute for a strong foundation, careful planning, and worthwhile
individual installments.
For further evidence of this, one need not look any further
than the currently flailing…
DC Extended Universe
a The “DCEU” has been a true tragedy in motion to watch.
Unlike the fragmented licensing of the Marvel properties,
Warner Bros. had 100% access to every inch of the DC Universe and still managed
to piss away all of the worth and potential of a functional Cinematic Universe
for DC superheroes by shutting out criticism to the inaugural entry and
doubling down on the vision of a man that presented a polarizing vision of the
setting’s most iconic character, producing a film subjected to a major critical
lambasting upon its release and lining up the subsequent 3 films for failure
via domino effect by counting their chickens before they hatched and accelerating
development on said films to follow a similar production mold.
I bring this all up here simply because I have no intention
of studying what went wrong with the DCEU in any particular depth in this series
at all. This is partially because I’ve more or less done that on some level
several times, ignoring my thoughts on the reviews of the actual films, which still
more or less stand as is.
Another factor in this is my general desire to move on from
beating a dead horse. A lot of my early ire for the DCEU stemmed from my frustration
in knowing that I may have lost any sense of iconography and adoration in the
depiction of some of my absolute favorite characters of all time. As the
continued success of the comic books with the DC Rebirth initiative has shown,
this is no longer the case and a general sense of understanding in who these
characters are and how forcing them against their mold with very little in the
way of insight has prevailed to make them better than ever and assure me that
even if they become unrecognizable, they’ll always make a comeback one day.
This leads into my third and final reason for avoiding the topic.
If you like the DCEU and any of its negatively received turn
out, we may disagree but power to you. My opinion should never be the final
authority on what you enjoy. However, there’s just no way to avoid the reality
at this point that the franchise is fundamentally broken and to say otherwise
would be mildly delusional.
The clusterfuck of “Justice League” and “Suicide Squad’s”
production, along with members of said casts and production expressing disappointment
and dissatisfaction with the final products is well documented at this point
and most of this is tied to a lukewarm response to “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of
Justice” that really wouldn’t have had much impact if its financial performance
and critical reception from both professional reviewers and audiences didn’t
indicate a problem that would inevitably sink the ship.
The accelerated time table that colored the bulk of the
Universe through the lens of a man that didn’t know how to make its content
resonate with audiences universally under the belief that the studio had a sure
fire hit on their hands just because marketing information shows that people
like a superhero cinematic universe thus assumed they would jump on board just
by meeting quotas is a fundamental problem that has led to the development of a
series that only works for a certain core demographic that doesn’t justify the
budgets being pumped into them.
If you need any further evidence than this, consider that
the only 2 film that haven’t been widely lambasted by critics and audiences are
“Wonder Woman” and “Man of Steel,” only one of which has received unambiguous critical
acclaim and both of which operate more or less independently of any world building
set into motion by “Dawn of Justice.”
Then recall that those little factoids are only the tip of
the iceberg that now consists of a shocking underperformance by “Justice
League,” whose aforementioned production nightmare may have actually led to the
intended crown jewel of the DCEU and Warner Bros. answer to “The Avengers”
losing money and damaging the future of their brand.
Universes don’t happen overnight and next time, we’ll kick
things off by looking at the one example of cynical thinking that led to
premature failure that dwarfs the DCEU by comparison, keeping its franchise in
the mummified grave from which it rose.
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