Sequels have been a thing for a long time. While the historical reality of Homer as a single individual is dubious, the Odyssey could be considered a sequel to the Iliad (though one that shifts the focus not only to a relatively minor character from the first story but also changes the scope and tone of the story profoundly.)
If we want to talk about modern franchise filmmaking, one obviously needs to consider Star Wars.
In general, and even well after Star Wars came out, sequels tended to be sort of unplanned. You have a movie that does well - often, but not always in an action/sci-fi/fantasy genre, or comedy - and given its success, studios decide to make a sequel to cash in on the good will that the first movie inspired in the audience.
Often, the results are underwhelming and disappointing. If the filmmakers can't come up with an interesting new conflict to build the story around, they often just rehash things that came before. The first Austin Powers movie, for instance, felt really exciting and new (even as a send-up of 1960s spy movies) but its sequels relied more and more on schtick and variations on earlier jokes.
Star Wars, to my knowledge, was the first film franchise to be built to be a series - which is perhaps not entirely accurate. I believe the original film, which retroactively was called "A New Hope" when it came to video, was meant to stand on its own. It's remarkable, watching that film in isolation, how vaguely sketched the Empire and Rebellion is.
But the insane success of the original Star Wars in 1977 led to both The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi to get the go-ahead, and in 1980 and 1982, the rest of the original trilogy was completed.
Indeed, you could certainly argue that Return of the Jedi committed some of those "sequel sins" by rehashing the threat of a new Death Star. Return of the Jedi was, I think, the first Star Wars film to be pretty divisive (to those who already liked the series - given how Star Wars and Jaws a few years before kind of heralded the death of New Hollywood, a lot of people were pretty upset with it already.)
The thing is, Jedi closed a trilogy that felt massive and epic in scope. We watched Luke go from naive farm boy to Jedi Master and push his corrupted father to a last-minute redemption, all while we saw the great, evil, fascistic Empire collapse in a pyrotechnic display of heroism.
Star Wars set an expectation for franchise filmmaking that would not actually really take hold until about 20 years later. The release of the massively popular Harry Potter books led to a commitment by Warner Brothers to adapt all seven novels before the series was even finished. At around the same time, Peter Jackson unveiled his epic adaptation of the quintessential fantasy series, the Lord of the Rings.
Jackson initially pitched Rings as a two-film series, wary that a studio would be hesitant to commit to doing three films. However, in what was a shock in the 90s when it happened but now seems like standard practice, New Line eagerly encouraged him to flesh it out into a trilogy.
Unlike Star Wars or the Harry Potter movies, Lord of the Rings was produced as a single massive film, with over a year of principle photography. The result, of course, was a remarkably consistent feel, tone, and sense of world that spanned the trilogy.
And the other result was that the films came out in rapid succession. For my last three years of High School, every December we would get a new Lord of the Rings movie. Between that and Harry Potter, fantasy fiction became far more popular, and led to much less successful adaptations of the Chronicles of Narnia, the Golden Compass, and imitators like Percy Jackson. Less than a decade after Return of the King came out (I only just now noticed how the last entry in both Lord of the Rings and the original Star Wars trilogy are "Return of the X") we got Game of Thrones.
But as we saw with Harry Potter, the three-movie model was no longer the biggest game in town.
Indeed, Star Wars, by that point, had expanded into a larger franchise, with the prequel trilogy starting in 1999 with Episode One: The Phantom Menace.
The prequels are a thorny subject for internet rantings. As a 13-year-old when the first of them came out, I wanted them so badly to be good that I convinced myself they were. Indeed, it seems a lot of people did. But as the hype over new Star Wars movies gave way to an examination of the oddly amateurish storytelling in these massive-budgeted effects spectaculars, a bit of the magic was diluted.
Sure, there were people who were pissed about Ewok teddy bears defeating the Galactic Empire back in the day, and indeed there are people now who defend the prequels, but it certainly complicated Star Wars' legacy.
The thing is, Star Wars grew from three to six films.
But if we're going to talk franchises, we have to talk about Marvel.
Blasting onto the scene with 2008's Iron Man, the combination of Jon Favreau's playful direction and Robert Downey Jr.'s pitch-perfect Tony Stark, Marvel Studios hit the ground running with a B-tier superhero that, thanks to these films, would emerge as definitively A-tier.
The moment, however, that things took off was the first of the now-famous post-credits scenes, in which megastar Samuel L. Jackson, who had not yet appeared in the movie, showed up to talk to Tony about the Avengers Initiative, and the potential of the MCU first started to unfold.
Marvel's take on franchise filmmaking has been transformative, and insanely successful. But it's also something no one else has managed to pull off. We've seen longrunning series - how many James Bond movies are there? But they've always followed a throughline - a single protagonist, or a single ongoing story, like that of the Skywalker bloodline.
Marvel essentially created a franchise of franchises. Iron Man had an entire trilogy to himself, dealing with corporate intrigue and technological one-upsmanship. Meanwhile, Thor could have his science-fantasy mythological conflicts and Captain America his explorations on patriotism and ethical values. But part of the joy of these movies was always that you got to see them all get together. While Thor is fighting his evil death-god sister, Iron Man is preventing some super-soldiers from taking over the country, and Captain America is uncovering a vast conspiracy, they can all get together to fight aliens together.
There are 22 freaking movies that have come out from Marvel in just eleven years. There are trilogies and quadrilogies within that greater franchise, and the characters aren't even limited to their own distinct movies and the Avengers crossovers - Tony Stark is a big part of Spiderman Homecoming, for example.
The massive success of Marvel has, I think, been well-earned. Some of the early outings were mediocre, but by this point, you're pretty much guaranteed to have fun with them if you're willing to buy into the heightened superhero world. But it has done a strange thing when it comes to franchise filmmaking (not to mention other kinds of filmmaking.)
This month, we're seeing the release of The Rise of Skywalker, the third movie in the Star Wars sequel trilogy. Since The Force Awakens came out in 2015, there have been four Star Wars movies - essentially one a year. While two were one-offs - the shockingly and refreshingly bleak Rogue One and the callback-obsessed fanservice prequel Solo - we're now getting the conclusion of this sequel trilogy, with the story of Rey and Kylo Ren coming to its climax.
But it feels weirdly quick, doesn't it?
I mean, on its surface, it's not. There's just almost as much time that has passed between Force Awakens and Rise of Skywalker as there was between Star Wars and Return of the Jedi. We've had two long movies to watch this story develop.
But in this day and age, we expect to have more time with a character.
By the time Robert Downey Jr.'s last scene as Tony Stark ends, we've had nine whole movies in which he's played a major role - his trilogy, the Avengers quadrilogy, and major parts of both Captain America: Civil War and Spiderman: Homecoming.
There's a whole other post to write about the popularity of more serialized television storytelling that has grown in the last 20 years, but even in our movies, we're getting accustomed to having a ton of time to get to know a character before we see their story conclude.
But that leaves us in this strange position. The Rise of Skywalker should be a massive event - the conclusion to an epic trilogy that has been going on for five years. But it doesn't really feel like that, does it?
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