On Franchise Fatigue

In 2013 I wrote an article exploring the box office failure of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s intended ‘comeback’ film The Last Stand. There had been a fair amount of buzz and no shortage of ‘he’s back’ headlines around the 80s throwback, but on release it sank like a stone.
 
This fascinated me, because The Last Stand was heaps of fun and who doesn’t love Arnie? But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that times had just changed. The star driven films of the 80s and 90s just didn’t have the same pull anymore, a capitalised surname above the title not enough to get audiences through the door. As I wrote at the time, we were now living through the ‘Age of the Geek’. A time where genre properties like Marvel, DC, The Hobbit and soon Star Wars dominated cinemas while TVs biggest hits included Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead and Doctor Who. It was a melancholic realisation, that a type of film I’d once loved had given way to another, but in the end it was hard to bemoan it too much.
 
See I adored those massive fantasy and sci-fi franchises. My early twenties bedrooms were always piled with memorabilia just in case anyone wasn’t aware. I saw The Force Awakens – and every subsequent new Star Wars movie – at the midnight screenings. I went to the cinema release of the Doctor Who 50th anniversary special. I hosted Game of Thrones nights and annoyed my friends with all my smug ‘but in the books…’ lectures. I saw every new Marvel film at the cinemas on opening weekend. For the massive corporations who realised this geek stuff was a goldmine, I was close to the perfect target.
 
It's funny to think now how exciting all the new Superbowl trailers used to be, or how I’d count down to Comic Con for big announcements from all my favourites. Funny because I can’t even really remember what that felt like anymore, to be so entirely enthusiastic for what now look more like cynical corporate products. But on balance it’s always better to like things than to not, and back then I liked a lot of things. I miss that feeling a bit.
 
But the issue isn’t that I turned around and started to dislike things. The issue is that I stopped caring. And based on the evidence, so did a lot of other people.
 
I’ll always suspect the tipping point for audience love affairs with big genre properties was The Last Jedi. Not because it was a terrible film – I still like it a lot – but because it was so deeply divisive that it changed the way fandom operated. It squarely put an end to the communal feeling of celebrating a new release because how can something be communal when audience opinions are violently split down the middle?
 
The result of this was an explosion of YouTube content creators who realised how profitable it could be to make endless videos geared directly towards people who didn’t like The Last Jedi. Or Captain Marvel. Or, soon enough, anything else perceived to be too progressive. Initially at least, the studios doubled down, resulting in the self-fulfilling prophecy of films and shows that actually were annoyingly preachy which led to more angry videos and so on. Meanwhile, the hubris invited by massive successes like The Force Awakens or Avengers: Endgame led to the in-hindsight mistaken belief that what audiences wanted was as much content as humanly possible, irrespective of quality. Hence the endless Disney+ shows.
 
I’m simplifying, of course. You can’t sum up the complexities of Blockbuster Hollywood’s past decade in a paragraph. But you can look at the results and recognise that at some point all of these bulletproof properties became very vulnerable indeed.
 
Star Wars hasn’t released a new movie since 2019, and its streaming shows tend to end after a single season due to low ratings. Marvel has suffered several major box office disappointments, their only recent unqualified success a film that brought back characters from the old 20th Century Fox superhero films. Star Trek is prematurely ending some shows, removing others entirely as tax write offs, and the closest thing they’ve had to a movie since 2016 is a universally derided streaming film. The Walking Dead has splintered into various spin off shows, none of which have seized the culture like the original. Doctor Who showed brief signs of renewed life due to a major deal with Disney, but with terrible ratings and no word of said deal’s renewal, the writing is on the wall. DC rebooted their entire cinematic universe after a string of failures, but with superhero fatigue an increasingly accepted reality it’s doubtful that will much help.
 
But all things considered the problem is less superhero fatigue than franchise fatigue. These big, special effects heavy, sci-fi/fantasy/comic book properties have dominated the culture for a long time now. With increasingly tangled continuities, unmemorable entries and noxious fan discourse, is it any wonder that at some point this stuff started to feel more like a pointless chore than the exhilarating entertainment it once was?
 
If you’d told me in 2013 that I’d be living in a time with a Lord of the Rings TV show, several Star Wars ones and a Doctor Who that had a bigger budget than ever, I’d think I was existing in a state of perpetual Christmas. Now? I don’t watch any of them.
 
Not long ago I read William Goldman’s industry classic Adventures in the Screen Trade. In the introduction he talks about the then recent collapse of the auteur driven ‘New Hollywood’ era due to the failure of Heaven’s Gate, and how it left executives terrified and uncertain of what audiences want now. The way he describes it sounds eerily similar to the last couple of years of insider leaks about desperate attempts to right the sinking ships of franchises that have kept much of Hollywood in work for, in some cases, decades.
 
This has happened before. Several times. The era of the star vehicle ended. As did New Hollywood. As did the western and the musical. None of these types of films went away, but their dominance did, as audience tastes and habits changed and attention turned to the next thing.
 
Likewise none of the above franchises will entirely die. Most of them have been around too long and endured plenty of changing tides, even if it meant resting for a while. But what I suspect has definitively ended is the ‘Age of the Geek’ I trumpeted in 2013, the time of once nerdy properties commanding bigger budgets, bigger box office, and near total cultural saturation.
 
That’s not a bad thing. At some point I’ll be able to look back on plenty of Marvel and Star Wars stuff with a lot more fondness than I can muster now. But as it stands? I’m ready for something new. 

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