How to make a great sequel in the age of recycled blockbusters
If January is Hollywood’s season for mercy killings of disposable box-office bombs, summer is when studios spawn squadrons of sequels, remakes and adaptations.
And when Hollywood brass discovers a cinematic pot of gold, the execs will remake and reboot it ad infinitum. It’s a business plan that predates the talkies, and when it works, it works.
Last year, “Creed” moved the punch-drunk Rocky franchise into exciting new territory, and the recent “Jungle Book” soared past its predecessor. When it doesn’t, well, did Ben Affleck really need to follow Harrison Ford’s stellar run as CIA analyst Jack Ryan? And Christian Bale’s as Bruce Wayne?
Yet for many moviegoers, franchise fever is an ever-widening addiction. Why do these films draw us into theaters like mosquitoes to a bug zapper?
That’s a pressing question as we approach the summer harvest of redo titles. This month alone features the third Captain America adventure and X-Men No. 9 (counting spinoffs). Upcoming, there’s a new crop of old favorites, with an all-female crew of Ghostbusters and the 20-year reunion of original cast members and aliens in “Independence Day: Resurgence.”
Turns out the design of this epic echo chamber is our own fault — in ways economic and psychological. Where culture and entertainment are concerned, “people do not like originality,” said John Watkins, a professor of English language and literature at the University of Minnesota.
The numbers don’t lie. Nine of the 10 highestgrossing films of 2015 were new versions of triedand-true titles — only Pixar’s “Inside Out” was based on an original idea. The average moviegoer sees six movies a year, and these are the ones they’re buying tickets to see. Meanwhile, respected filmmakers Guillermo del Toro, the Wachowskis and Brad Bird all released fresh movies that cratered at the box office.
It’s not just movies. Sequel mania “is happening throughout the culture,” Watkins said. “It’s people wanting to read the same series of novels over and over, or Broadway and movie adaptations of things they’ve liked.”
We behave that way from earliest childhood, he said, when bedtime stories trigger “the word every parent dreads, ‘Again, again.’ ”
Familiarity breeds contentment for adults, too.
“The nice thing about seeing the latest version of ‘Hero Confronts Enemy and Gets Girl at the End,’ ” Watkins said, “is your brain doesn’t have to work that hard.”
Jodie Foster is a Hollywood heavyweight who has exclusively pursued original material from her start as a child actor to her current sideline as a film director. Rather than following clearly profitable paths, she said, “I just try to make the best movies, and then I hope people will go. But if they don’t, I get to say, ‘I was so lucky to get to make that movie, and I hope I can make another one.’ I think that you just have to do the best work you possibly can and have faith that if you make it meaningful and you make it good, people will come.”
That’s what led her to helm “Money Monster,” a darkly comic political crime thriller that hit theaters Friday, just as the blockbuster season pushes into high gear.
Clichés are not all bad, provided they’re carefully handled. So how can you make an ingenious followup film that escalates the appeal of a popular franchise? What is the secret sauce that turns continuity into an irresistible source of fan-ticipation? Here are a few of the ingredients.