Sequel Cancer

Google the movies that are playing in town right now and I bet you, you’ll find at least a few of these… ‘franchise films’.

Sequels, prequels, remakes, re-boots etc all of them pretty much fall in the same category. Meaning, you definitely know the genre, you probably already know the main characters (except the new baddie being wheeled in every time), you pretty much know the entire story after having watched the trailer and in all likelihood you will see a slightly different version of the same product, very soon.

Doesn’t that sound boring? You bet, it does. Would it surprise you then, if I told you that since 1999, except Avatar, every single year the highest grossing movie worldwide has been a franchise movie? Here’s the list…

Lord of the rings novel series written in 1930s, nicely made into a movie trilogy… very good. Harry Potter… each movie following the release of the corresponding novel… even better experience. These are beautiful works of fiction and fantasy which inspire the directors soul and seduce their visual storytelling talent. I completely agree with you,  it would be hard to put all that content into one. We needed (and craved for) those sequels.

But how about this? There’s a total of 7 Hollywood Superman movies so far. In the last 2 decades itself, Warner Bros have produced 7 Batman movies. Columbia pictures is slightly ahead with 4 movies made on Spiderman in the last ten years and they’re reopening the franchise this summer! But the winner of this superhero per studio race is Paramount pictures, who by 2013, will have given us 4 Iron Man movies in the last 5 years. And despite so much collective destruction of evil by the superheroes, the world still has problems.

Should I even bother you with the counts of how many Paranormal activity, Hangover, MIB, Final destination, Mummy, Journey, Ice Age, Madagascar, Halloween, Nightmare, Pirates, Scream, Saw, Step up, American pie, Fast&Furious etc etc have come out? In the year 2011 alone, 28 sequels were released and most were profitable ventures.

With 7 billion people on the planet, from nearly 250 countries and about 1500 different cultures, I would imagine the world has a LOT of interesting, untold stories.

Go watch the organic Moonrise Kingdom this weekend.