From Jaws to Terminator Salvation the world of Hollywood seems to thrive on the idea of the franchise. Taking a concept and seeing how far it can be stretched until the patience of even the most forgiving audiences has waned completely is the backbone of the franchise ideal. If a film does well the first time, why bother with discovering more new ideas when we can repeat the same idea over and over. While I’m sure this helps line the pockets of Hollywood studios and we as fans have grown used to this factory like nature of the film industry, I can’t help but think we’ve forgotten the most injured party in all of this; the original film.
Realistically we’ll never change the money-driven business of Hollywood so trying just seems foolish. I appreciate those who are waiting for a resurgence of the seventies era of filmmaking but that’s not going to happen. Marketing, toys, soundtracks, tie-ins, and all of that fair to heavily into the final life of a movie for any real change to take place. I’m doing this more to not forget the original movie idea that is usually so badly beaten by the end of the franchise you hardly remember how important the film was when it happened.
The main problem with the franchise stems from two very separate issues. The first is trying to launch a franchise off of a movie that had a satisfactory ending. Many point at Jaws as the first blockbuster that really led to the transformation of Film Making into Movie Making, so let’s start there. Jaws is a wonderful film, not just as eye candy but also on a filmmaking level. It had a rich story, solid characters, great dialog and it ended perfectly. Brody destroys the shark, finds Hooper and they swim back to shore. There is nothing to bounce a sequel off of, but Jaws 2 came out anyway. There was no way to create a new film from what happened in the original so the filmmakers had to come up with something people would buy. Another Shark comes back for revenge, BANG there we go, it’s movie-making time.
Nobody really cared about making another Jaws movie they wanted a butts-in-seats summer flick that featured lots and lots of shark. Jaws 2 came out and the film really felt like a collection of shark parts. The next sequel had to rely on a 3-D gimmick and number 4 tried to reinvent the Brody family and failed. The sad part is that the original Jaws gets lost in the fray. Sure people talk about how great the film was but it doesn’t have the classic reverence that Citizen Kane or Casablanca has. I feel a large part of that is because of the franchise that broke the shark’s back.
The Exorcist is another movie that ended with a finished storyline so the filmmakers had to try and just reinvent someway to bring the Devil back and have it mess with people. Exorcist III is a great example of just using the name to get people to come to the movie while maintaining the thinnest ties to the original. The original Exorcist film suffered because of its association to the not quite related sequels. People I know were shocked at how disturbing the original film was, because they had seen the sequels first. In trying to keep up with the shock and horror value of the two sequels there was even extra footage added to the original Exorcist to make it more in line with the franchise.
These types of franchise movies have been the most persistent and usually the most heinous. Predator 2 was a bad movie that took the cool idea of the original and stripped it of anything outside of the Predator’s violence. Conan was a great movie, not just a great fantasy movie but also a solid movie end to end. Take a good look at the Conan sequel and tell me how that can even be called a Conan movie.
The other types of Franchises usually have to do with characters or plots developed specifically to create a long running movie series. These films are usually awful to begin with or they start well only to collapse under the weight of the franchise. Take Friday The 13th, horror buffs may scream for my blood but from the first to the last those movies were pretty awful and really cheap. I love to hear people complain about how Jason Takes Manhattan didn’t hold up to the power of the original. Right, the original was such a testimony to subtle filmmaking. Nightmare On Elm Street, Saw, Maniac Cop, the list of these kinds of franchises goes on and on.
The oddest part here is that these horror movies created to be franchises were spawned by a film that wasn’t; Halloween. Though often stuck next to Halloween II due to it being the same night, the original was meant to be a stand-alone movie. Evil never dies so Michael Myers (the killer) vanishing at the end showed that he was really a force of nature that could never be stopped, not that he got up and decided to start slashing and cutting pretty girls. Director/Writer of the original John Carpenter has even admitted that he made the sequel really sub-par because he hated having to do it. The worst part is that the original style and grace of Halloween has not only been eclipsed by the many awful sequels but also the Rob Zombie re-make which is another Franchise staple I’ll get to in a minute.
When movies set up to become franchises work they the usually do because we’re more invested in the character than the movie. James Bond is the most successful running franchise in film history but that’s because we love Bond himself not the movies. Ever met anybody who likes a couple of James Bond movies? Nope, it’s usually an argument between the Sean Connery or Roger Moore series with the occasional detractor throwing in Timothy Dalton or Pierce Bronson’s run. The same can be said for Superman, Batman, Indiana Jones and so on. We love the characters so instead of having to come up with some scratch idea to jump-start the films they just stick the character in a new adventure.
Where these movies run into problems usually comes with the amount of movies made after the original. Superman I was a great movie featuring Superman same as Raiders Of The Lost Ark was a great film featuring the character Indiana Jones. With each sequel the films lost something until they just completely fell apart. Look at how great Raiders was and then watch Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull. It felt like Steven Spielberg and his cronies were actually trying to make a movie that would be as bad as Raiders was good. While the progression from Raiders to Crystal Skull was slow (Temple Of Doom & The Last Crusade both being decent if flawed movies) the end was very pronounced.
With Superman you saw a more severe progression as Superman II was a clunky action film, Superman III tried to be a comedy and then Superman IV was a shallow attempt to put Superman back in the limelight. All of the sequels were so far beneath the original most don’t even consider Superman a great film due to guilt by association.
People tend to lump the Alien series in this category but I don’t agree. Aliens, James Cameron’s sequel to Alien, was a spectacular film but it wasn’t what Aliens was, it wasn’t creepy or suspenseful it was just an all out action movie. The original Alien was its own movie that ended nicely with main character Ripley on her way home after killing the Alien. It didn’t need to have a sequel though I will say the idea for Aliens was much more thought out than most sequels. Of course from there things got progressively worse until Alien Resurrection, which was so bad they finally stopped. The worst part is that Ridley Scott’s original Alien masterpiece is largely overshadowed by Cameron’s action shoot-em-up Aliens which isn’t fair since Scott’s movie is actually a better film.
Sure there are anomalies in the franchise ideal e.g. The Dark Knight which surpassed its predecessor Batman Begins on every level but those are few and far between. For the most part you get a great original followed by either less-than sequels or straight failures. One of my biggest bones of contention here comes with the Terminator series; a series I feel betrays the original horribly. The original Terminator was a gritty science fiction classic with a new angle on the future and some really new ideas. It didn’t need a sequel; it didn’t need anything but to stand-alone.
Where my blood boils is the reverence people have for Terminator 2, as though it can even stand in the same room as the original. Terminator 2 was a way to sell toys and fast food tie ins. Gritty was sacrificed for flash and the Terminator went from the ultimate killing machine to a pet robot you could teach catch phrases to. Even the brutality of the original Terminator was sold down the river for the “liquid” Terminator, who was fun to watch but had no gravitas to it. Terminator 3 and Terminator Salvation are both bad movies that resemble the original in only the most transparent ways. Both have done a great job of sealing the tomb where the power of the original Terminator lies dormant forever.
Two of the worst offenders in the franchise world not only ended on a down note but also managed to destroy their legacy. I’m referring to Star Wars and The Godfather, two film franchises that were sacrificed to the dragon of greed in a most horrible way. The worst of the two is obviously Star Wars. George Lucas created not only three classic films with the original series but also a modern mythology for my generation. With no regard to what those films meant to the world he ruined them by releasing Episode I-III. These films were like reverse Roger Rabbit movies with humans running around an animated world. The lack of care in regards to plot, dialog, characters and movie making managed to turn the story of Darth Vader into a joke. That’s not easy to do. The combined putrescence of these movies has ruined even the original trilogy for a lot of fans.
The Godfather, though not as bad, should still be shameful of how it allowed the Franchise to ruin films that again created a modern mythology. The Godfather and The Godfather Part II redefined the gangster film taking it away from “Made it, Ma! Top of the world!” [White Heat, 1949] and placing it firmly in the grasp of Shakespearean epic. Then years later it was decided the time had come to flush those films down the toilet with Godfather III a film that rang as phony as the others did true. From Al Pacino’s overacting to the often talked about performance of Sofia Coppola, Godfather III felt like the people making it just didn’t care about these characters or their legacy.
In today’s Hollywood the idea boat for franchises has even more holes in it to the point that remakes have become the rule instead of the exception. Ask any producer or studio exec why they have allowed so many remakes and the answer will almost always be “to re-launch the franchise”. Producers and writers can’t even come up with new ideas to ruin with Franchises so they have to remake old ones. It’s to the point now where these films feel like the test used to see if spaghetti is finished cooking. Studios take movies and throw them against the wall; if they stick we have a new franchise if not who cares. Even if the original was a decent movie and had its place in celluloid history nobody gives a damn. Remake it, put it out, mass market it and try to get the franchise off the ground. If not, toss it on the loser pile and move on.
Outside of that method studios are ramping up the character-not-story angle by trying to make every comic book property in the world into a franchise. The sad thing is those films aren’t standing on their own; instead they start out being bred to franchise. Iron Man felt from frame one as if it was setting us up for a sequel and Captain America and Thor are almost admittedly being made to familiarize the public with the characters for the big money cash in franchise: The Avengers. It feels like everything is being geared towards the franchise movie, with the original film more a launching pad than an actual film.
The next time you’re at the video store pick some of these original movies up and watch them as though they don’t have any sequels in their legacy. Even something that’s usually lumped together like the Karate Kid series or Ghostbusters or any of a hundred franchise originators. When you watch these films forget about the sequels and you’ll be able to see the magic of what the film was originally about.
There’s real filmmaking going on in a lot of these original movies not just franchise hopes. If franchise filmmaking must continue I suppose there’s little I can do about it other than hope that somewhere, at some point, we as fans get to be part of those little movies that mean so much before their violated by the franchise gods with dollar signs in their eyes.
