In 2019 (before the world stopped), of the top 10 highest grossing movies of the year, only 2 were no sequels or remakes. And of those two, only one was about a character we’d never seen on the big screen before (Captain Marvel). This highlights a serious problem in Hollywood: an inability to say goodbye.
Hollywood, and especially Hollywood execs, love their remakes, reboots and sequels. The main driving force behind this is the thinking that “the first one made X amount of money, so a sequel should be equally as popular.” The problem with this thinking is the suits never factor in why the first movie was as popular as it was or why it did so well.
Take the How To Train Your Dragon franchise. It consists of 3 movies and 8 seasons of TV shows, and at no point did it feel like the writers were scraping the barrel for story ideas. A brilliant story told through different media over the better part of a decade ended in 2019. Those characters’ stories are done. If someone comes with an idea for another sequel, it would be pointless. Once your story get’s to this point, there should be no sequels.
A popular culprit of this is the Star Wars franchise. The Skywalker saga, pre 2015, consisted of 6 movies and a complete story. We witness Anakin’s fall to the dark side and his eventual redemption over six movies. That’s it. Story done. But Star Wars is a huge cultural phenomenon, so when Lucasfilm was bought by Disney, they naturally had to figure out how to make more money off this thing that is loved by millions.
So in 2015 we got the first film of the Sequel trilogy. It started off well enough, but by the second film it was apparent that Disney had no idea what they were doing with the trilogy, and it was going to (and did) end in disaster. The Sequel trilogy is what happens when the suits make creative decisions.
Now, this is not to say that nothing must have sequels or that nothing should be remade or rebooted. Some of my favorite films are reboots and remakes. The key ingredient in those films was that the remake was an organic choice made by the filmmaker and not one foisted on them by some suits in a boardroom. Ocean’s 11 was a remake of a 1960 film and it was brilliant.
This problem is by no means localized to the film industry. TV shows, animated and live-action, also suffer from the problem of when to say goodbye. In many ways it’s harder for TV shows because it’s easy to get sucked into the thinking that “last season’s ratings were pretty good, let’s do one more”, and it definitely doesn’t help that TV show fans can be rabid.
The first five seasons of the TV show Supernatural were brilliant, amazing. Some of the best TV out there. And the show was intended to end at five seasons, but it was renewed by the network for more. So, writers who feel like they’ve told their story now have to dig and stretch the fiber of what was once a great story until it’s hardly recognizable. This shows the counterintuitive nature of such decisions. Giving the people what they want rarely works out because human wants are insatiable. They will never be satisfied and the story can’t go on forever.
Another example of this is The CW’s Riverdale. Now, Riverdale was an okay show in the start. But when a show based on Archie Comics (which were never serialized) keeps getting renewals, it’s very easy to see when they’d run out of ideas.
It’s gotten to the point where the show is unrecognizable from what was being shown in the first season.
Again, these are examples of TV studio execs not recognizing when to call it on a show, and this inevitably leads to a visible decline in the quality of the show, to say nothing on shows with sudden, painful drops.
On the flipside, when the creators decide to revive their show, or add another season because they feel like they have more story to tell, then the result can be spectacular.
In 2008, Avatar: The Last Airbender concluded after three seasons. Nobody would have cared if Bryan and Mike (co-creators of A:TLA) wrote another three seasons of meandering because we loved the characters, but it was done. Aang’s story was complete. Then in 2012, we get The Legend of Korra, an amazing story about a new avatar, and her own journey. A sequel to a beautiful story that came about not because Corporate wants to capitalize on a booming market, but because the creators had a story to tell and told it to completion.
With the Avatar Studios news, and Disney’s endless list of live-action remakes, my fear is that Hollywood will never grow out of it’s reminiscent and nostalgia phase. I only hope that they eventually learn the most important lesson in storytelling: You have to know when to end.
