Jurassic World, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and Fantastic Four all turn 10 this year, and Hollywood is mostly frozen in time and holding on to nostalgia
2015 was a pretty big year for Hollywood and pop culture as a whole, and we’re still feeling its impact a whole decade later. In fact, it was so big that most studios have struggled to move past that era of nostalgic revivals and huge franchises at the peak of their popularity. As we await a new Jurassic World, yet another Superman reboot, and the return of the Fantastic Four, we gotta wonder how much longer the whole industry can run on past glories.
In many ways, 2019 marked the end of an era. We all know what happened right after in early 2020, but the 2010s’ final year also represented the finale for massive IPs such as Game of Thrones, the MCU, and Star Wars… except it wasn’t. Despite a handful of solid efforts to kickstart new movie/TV franchises in recent years, the pandemic, market woes, and a general fear of looking to the future have pushed Hollywood to continue to rely on what’s safe and easy to market until it’s all dried up and dead.
To be fair, nothing’s ever really gone for too long if it’s been a huge success. This has been happening for decades, but when people talk about a ‘saturation’ of IP nowadays, they talk about getting too much too fast of a mostly good thing, which in turn ends up souring potential audiences on the thing they used to love. With a more relentless pace of production and distribution, the chances of messing something up also go up. Just look at what’s happened to Marvel Studios’ reputation in recent years or the general apathy towards Star Wars as a whole even if a handful of D+ shows hit it big.
These are just some examples. Last year, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, the first-ever Mad Max spinoff, failed to elicit the excitement caused by Fury Road in 2015. Likewise, 2023’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny felt like a small blip in the cultural conversation because new generations largely don’t care about the character. Same goes for The Flash after it relied too heavily on bringing back an iteration of Batman which means nothing to the average zoomer. You don’t fill cinemas by appealing to 50-year-old men and us nerds, I’m afraid.
By and large, however, nostalgia continues to pay off. 2022’s Jurassic World: Dominion made just over $1 billion in spite of getting dreadful reviews from critics and fans alike, which explains why Universal rushed into a ‘new era’ for the franchise with little to no downtime. What’s the way to ensure fatigue? Uh, returning to the basics (again) after the average fan simply wasn’t comforted enough by Colin Trevorrow’s bolder swings with his trilogy past 2015’s Jurassic World. Will this pay off? Probably, as general audiences just appear to love dinosaurs and the ‘remix with a spark of new’ approach worked well enough for Alien: Romulus last year.
Marvel Studios’ Fantastic Four reboot, one of the company’s priorities after Disney acquired Fox’s entire library, will also arrive 10 years after the last attempt to reignite the (seemingly cursed) IP. They say third time’s the charm, but Disney and Marvel are placing additional weight on it as the MCU as a whole struggles to get back to proper good health despite Deadpool & Wolverine’s recent win (another one owed to nostalgia and bringing back heroes past their prime). In this context, the setting being a retro, 100% alternate-universe Space Race has a double meaning, and with the more progressive Marvel characters failing to convince for a variety of reasons, perhaps this is a sign of where things are heading after the Multiverse Saga is awkwardly wrapped up by 2027.
Elsewhere, we have How To Train Your Dragon’s live-action remake offering nothing new, Disney likely doing the same with Snow White and Lilo & Stitch, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning trying to put an end to Ethan Hunt’s saga (but probably not the franchise), and the Minecraft movie arriving more than a decade late. Those are just some examples. Not every single one will be bad, but this is what tired moviegoers mean when they say we’re in a ‘slop era’ where IP takes priority. You can find fresh ‘nutrients’ elsewhere, sure, but the high-concept, actually original blockbusters are few and far between.
In this scenario, James Cameron’s third (out of five) Avatar movie would be considered ‘fresh’ in the sense that it’s not working with a tired boomer IP or awkwardly trying to adapt a video game or comic book. Still, the first Avatar will be 16 by the time it opens, so we could consider the sequel plans nostalgic by now too. Mind you, I love those movies and truly believe he and his people put in amazing work to make them stand out, but it is what it is.
I’m not gonna lie: I’m pretty pumped up for many of these, perhaps for entirely different reasons, maybe because I’m hoping the creatives can inject enough life into tired stories and universes that once were far more attractive on a basic level. It’s a stance that often pays off, at least for me. Plus, I’m a ‘glass half full’ type of guy. Nonetheless, I’d like to be able to look forward to more crowd-pleasers that are fully unexpected, such as Jordan Peele’s entire output or Ryan Coogler’s Sinners.
Funnily enough, Predator is a franchise currently positioned to tell new stories that also please the old guard after 2022’s Prey and what we know about Badlands so far. There’s also a small glimmer of hope for Star Wars with forward-thinking pitches such as a post-Skywalker Saga movie led by Rey or a super distant prequel that shows us the origins of the Jedi Order and how people first used the Force. Until those happen and dare to do something thematically brave, get ready to see more X-wings and Imperial Remnants.
As we enter the midpoint of the decade and things unfortunately look dark all over the world, chances are audiences will turn to movies and TV in a big way for quick evasion. After all, that’s what crowd-pleasing entertainment has always been all about. But it’s also important to demand that art (I don’t buy the ‘high/low art’ dross) discusses the problems of the present and dares to move forward, slowly but steadily, towards a better tomorrow.
The problem is that, right now, it just feels like we’re adrift and trying to clumsily figure out whether we’re more scared of the past or the future. As for the people footing the bills of mainstream productions, they’ve got it all figured out. Your move.