Image from Avengers: Endgame (2019)
In 2021, at the writing of this chapter, the world of visual media is in a state of flux more tumultuous than it has been in decades. The introduction of streaming services has upended several industries, the coronavirus pandemic has brought the lurking danger of the end of cinemagoing as we know it to a head, and media critics everywhere are casting about for people and phenomena to blame for the massive changes that the filmmaking industry is undergoing. Among the chief causes to blame for the downfall of one of the few remaining mass culture enterprises, Hollywood filmmaking, is the sequel. In a piece for The Guardian in 2019, seemingly prompted by the popularity of Marvel’s capstone for the previous decade’s worth of films, Avengers: Endgame, David Cox writes that when films get a sequel and that sequel gets a sequel, “Creative exhaustion inevitably threatens.”[i] Cox’s article is indicative of a larger sentiment among moviegoers and media critics alike, specifically that sequels stand as the nadir of Hollywood’s drive towards making money above creative output. “Inevitably,” Cox writes, “the sequels juggernaut is throttling fresh ideas, the lifeblood of any creative activity. It may be offering the movies a short-term fix by imperiling their long-term health.”[ii] It is a foregone conclusion, in Cox’s formulation, that sequels absolutely will lead to the self-inflicted and intimate death of Hollywood as an industry, a kind of autoerotic asphyxiation accident writ large. Cox imagines a mythical “past” when “each excursion to the cinema unveiled a new world of characters, situations, stories, sets, locations, and ways of seeing.”[iii] This past doesn’t and never did exist, as sequels and serials were integral to the growth of Hollywood as an industry. Whether it was the weekly entries in long running series like The Perils of Pauline or Flash Gordon, or the later heavily sequelized franchises like The Thin Man or Universal monster movies or, as Kristin Thompson notes, the Danish crime drama sequel Dr. Gar el Hama flugt from 1912[iv], the serial has existed throughout film history. And yet, Cox can’t help but pathologize the drive towards sequels as a “chance to retreat into thought bunkers with those of like mind, and cut ourselves off from unsettling ideas.”[v] The sequel, in his conception, is a wholly safe and unchallenging place in which the “comfort[s] of repetition” recall the “consoling” nature of children being told “the same bedtime story every night.”[vi] Not content with the self-harm metaphor for Hollywood, now it becomes the infantilizing force in popular culture, ensuring that audiences remain emotionally and mentally stunted as they delight in the same pleasures over and over again. Cox ends his article by suggesting that “Maybe … it is time for filmgoers to grow up,” but it is Cox’s easy ideas about the nature of film and sequels, audiences and the industry, that need to be interrogated more thoroughly. Cox isn’t alone in his dismissal of the sequel as toxic and damaging to the industry from which they come, cries of “franchise fatigue”[vii] damaging box office numbers and audience enjoyment have been commonplace for years.
Posters for the three original Star Wars films
If the discourse around sequels as an instance of franchised production is largely of fatigue, why and how do they continue to be successful in terms of box office performance and audience approval? The sequel, particularly in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century Hollywood context that this study is primarily interested in, comes most often from a desire to create or expand upon a franchised intellectual property. However, franchised production, like Hollywood production in the post-classical era according to Barry Langford[viii], is not as stable as it seems. To explain how franchises come into existence Derek Johnson points toward “the shared exchange of content resources across multiple industrial sites and contexts of production operating in collaborative but contested ways through networked relation to one another (frequently across boundaries of media platform, production community, and geography).”[ix] This is perhaps most easily seen in the attempts to cohere the Star Wars franchise through careful management by Lucasfilm (under Disney) which still produces conflicting levels of canonicity[x] and artistic creation[xi], not to mention the destruction of the previous Extended Universe canon novels, games, and other media. Johnson goes on to suggest that “The products and content offered by media franchising, therefore, might be considered less in terms of unified brands and singular corporate interests, but instead as contested grounds of collaborative creativity where networked stakeholders have negotiated the ongoing generation, exchange, and use of shared cultural resources.”[xii] Johnson is quick to point out that this notion of “collaborative creativity” that franchises sprout from is not intended to celebrate the franchise as a site for unbounded creativity and invention, “but instead as a site where the autonomy and freedom of individuals laboring within media institutions might be imagined, organized, and contested.”[xiii] If the franchise is, as part of Hollywood’s overall production strategy, constantly being reinvented as different media laborers bring their ideas for how their piece of the franchise can best work within the structures of the economic deals and boundaries they are operating under, the permutations that result from successful and repeated franchise formulae tell important stories about the historical and industrial situations in which they appear.
Much has been made of the way movie studios becoming small parts of larger conglomerates lead to the development of the franchising strategies of the 1980s and beyond[xiv], but there has been decidedly less theorizing exactly how that happened. In this chapter, I bring together theories of serialized storytelling and industrial theories of shifting production and exhibition processes in response to changing consumption trends within Hollywood film and television production to explain how one particular version of serialized franchise production became popular across visual media starting in 2008. The elegiac sequel, as I call them, is not a new phenomenon but has newly become one of two (along with the cinematic universe as seen in the Marvel and Conjuring franchises) dominant modes of franchised production in the past two decades. Here I will first explain what an elegiac sequel is before looking at examples of the elegiac sequel that were made throughout film history but which did not lead to such an explosion of them as we can see starting in 2008. Following that brief history, I will look at the industrial pressures that explain why the elegiac sequel became such a popular format for reviving and continuing franchises in the early twenty-first century.
[i] Cox, David. “Nearing the Endgame: Is Hollywood’s Lust for Sequels Destroying Cinema?” The Guardian, May 16, 2019. http://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/may/16/hollywood-sequels-cinema-avengers-endgame.
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Thompson, Kristin. The Frodo Franchise: The Lord of the Rings and Modern Hollywood. E-Book. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. https;//hdl.handle.net/2027/heb.08180.
[v] Cox, David.
[vi] Ibid.
[vii] Brew, Simon. “Franchise Fatigue: Why Big Movie Sequels Are Underperforming at the Box Office (Even the Good Ones).” The Independent, July 7, 2017. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/franchise-fatigue-blockbuster-sequels-hollywood-obsession-marvel-universal-warner-bros-despicable-me-3-mummy-a7829546.html.
[viii] “Above and beyond any defined or definable set of stylistic parameters or industrial practices, this ongoing reinvention may be the most classical of all Hollywood’s enduring traditions.” Langford, Barry. Post-Classical Hollywood: Film Industry, Style, and Ideology Since 1945. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010, 283.
[ix] Johnson, Derek. Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in the Culture Industries. E-Book. Postmillennial Pop. New York City: New York University Press, 2013, 7.
[x] See the Lego Star Wars games and holiday specials that bend if not break canonicity
[xi] See the storytelling struggle between the two directors of the Sequel Trilogy films as they went back and forth over what to do with plot elements such as Rey’s parentage
[xii] Ibid., 7
[xiii] Ibid., 14
[xiv] See Langford, Johnson, Thompson, Hall and Neale,