A week before Fast
& Furious 6’s wide release, Universal Studios announced that it is
already in pre-production for the series’ seventh film. While the franchise has
enjoyed somewhat consistent box office success from the series, it seems as
though the plan to create a sequel comes before the film’s plot development,
itself. In effect, as large studios allow the call for a sequel to dictate the
terms of the narrative, the content is formed after the loose promise of a
structure. Examples of these would include Fast
& Furious, The Hangover and Transformers: films that become largely
made for the sake of being marketable as sequels. This is no new phenomenon,
but the continual churning out of sequels that have plot so deprioritized in
the order of production, feeds into this trend.
The most flagrant reminder of this calcifying
“made-for-sequels” genre that I’ve seen recently, came in the form of Iron Man 3’s ending sequence. Iron Man not only has his powers removed from
him, but removed in such an irreversible manner—surgically amending a massive
cavity in his chest—that surely this should mark the end of the franchise. However,
even then, the studio remains unable to fully close the door on this lucrative
series, as it ambiguously asserts, “Tony Stark will return” during the ending
credits.
Even movies that are based on pre-existing serial works face
this dilemma—albeit on a lesser scale. Singular pieces of work are no longer
impervious to large-scale “sequalization,” especially when stand-alone books
like The Hobbit are split into two
parts.
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