With the news that Michael Bay may be filming Transformers 4 & 5 back to back and the news that came earlier in the year that Justin Lin will be filming Fast 6 & 7 back to back, I ask you now why do we need so many movie franchises?Movie franchises have always plagued cinema and 95% are utter rubbish. A few exceptions? George A Romero's Dead trilogy, Back to the Future (although the third one was not brilliant) the Terminator films (the first three only) and my personal favourite the Scream films.
Franchise's like Harry Potter and Twilight really irritate me, I felt the whole Harry Potter, all 8 films, could of been explained in the last film, actually it was all explained in the last film, so what did we need the other 7 for? Yes it was fun watching Harry, grow up and learn magic but it didn't need to run for 8 films. A trilogy would of sufficed. As for Twilight... 4 films? Personally I think they have ruined and made a laughing stock of Vampire movies. Give me a good old fashioned Hammer Dracula any day over that crap.
Vampires are supposed to scare people, thats what they are here for, when Stroker wrote Dracula he wanted to scare people. All through film history Vampires were portrayed as scary and evil, now Twilight has come along, thrown all of that out of the window and made them teenage romance films. I wonder if the reason Robert Pattinson always looks in such pain is because he has to work with the rest of the Twilight people or it could simply be because he cant act. Never have I seen an actor so useless in my life, and i've worked with student actors.Why do we get so many sequels, prequels and spin off's then?
Simple: Money. They make money and lots of it. Hollywood today don't care about narrative and telling a story all they care about is how much money a film makes. If Twilight had been a disaster at the box office, the production company would of thought twice about making the second one, but Twilight was always going to succeed, unfortunately. Why? because they are based on books, yep its an adaptation (something else that really annoys me, I'll save that for another blog though) so it already had a pre existing fan base. People read the book and like it, they will want to see the film. People read the book and hate it will probably want to see the film, to see if the director has made it any better.
Horror films have a history of franchise's. Halloween has had 9 sequels (including 2 remakes) Friday the 13th has 11 sequels (including 1 cross over and 1 remake). People love the characters and will always keep coming back for more. I will admit, I have all the Halloween films on DVD, I hate most of them but I have them all and when Halloween 3D comes out next year, I'll hate it but I'll go see it and get it on DVD.Unfortunately Hollywood has run out of original ideas. It has to rely on adaptations, remakes and Franchises to appeal to the audience. Yes Hollywood is to blame for supplying us with these films but the audience is also equally to blame as we keep going to see these films and making them so successful.
Franchises and remakes are killing Western cinema. It seems the only thing the US film market can cough these days is a remake of this or a "re-imagining" of that. They're mostly dreadful to boot. I can recall the "re-imagining" of DAWN OF THE DEAD being ok, but that's all. Just "OK".
ReplyDeleteAs for vampires, only Steve Niles has recently delivered a gruesome and viable representation of these creatures with his 30 DAYS OF NIGHT series of comics (and two movies). His representation is up there with both those of Stoker and HAMMER. His vampires are vicious, brutal, cannibalistic almost. They are an unforgiving and persistant enemy, NOT a love-lorn 'teen' with a Jedward haircut fighting over a moody bit of skirt.
Let's see no...what have we had or heard about of the last year or so:
FRIGHT NIGHT
CONAN
THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (because people cannot read subtitles obviously....)
LET ME IN (see above)
THE THING (ok, a 'prequel' but still not original)
TOTAL RECALL
HIGHLANDER
RED DAWN
ROBOCOP
SPIDER-MAN
TRUE GRIT (although this was outstanding!)
VIDEODROME
....that's twelve movies that are in NO WAY original. Between remakes and adaptations of comics, film-making in the west has little else to offer.
(Don't get me started on "Potter...")
You are totally right. why do we need sooooooo many sequels and prequels. I mean enough is enough. I mean if all film makers started making sequels to movies then they might as well stop filming altogether. I mean like you said 1 to 3 of the movie is alright because it would be like a begining, a middle and an end like a book. But NO they have to do quite a few that sometimes drag on and seem pointless. It just sort of loses the authentication of the film is there are continious sequals, prequels and remakes (Depending on what the movie is lol).
ReplyDeleteSALmations OUT!