Looking at the studio release schedule for the impending holiday season is a lot like surveying the Manhattan skyline for 18th-century churches and two-storey buildings. Sure, they’re in there somewhere, but good luck picking them out from behind all those space-hogging skyscrapers and quasi-phallic corporate monoliths.
In movie terms, the churches and brownstones are like films that you know little about, but that might provoke, upset or inspire you none the less. The skyscrapers are the movie franchises; always proliferating, overly familiar, increasingly bloated, and forever blotting out the sun. These are movies that you have seen before and that you will see again, each time under slightly different titles or, more likely, under different digits.
Now, didn’t I see just Harry Potter last year? Well, yes, but he’s back again. And if I don’t like his adventures this year, I’ve got another five instalments in which to learn to love the speccy little git. And much as I enjoyed one serving of The Lord of the Rings, it grieves me that I will have to sit through two sequels before Peter Jackson, one of the most intoxicatingly talented directors alive, gets back to pulling sick and demented ideas out of his own head, not clean-minded, pseudo-Arthurian legends out of JRR Tolkien’s.
It’s the same with The Matrix: I loved it first time, but if it didn’t hold together after two viewings, how about after two sequels? The franchise issue doesn’t just disfigure this year’s holiday line-up, it will do the same for years to come. At this rate, we won’t be shot of Harry until 2009. If The Lord of the Rings keeps going all the way to its conclusion, who knows, we may yet see The Silmarillion and Farmer Giles of Ham on our screens, and I very much doubt The Hobbit will remain unfilmed for long.
If this American summer blockbuster season was any indication of likely trends, we will be inundated with yet more franchises, not just further instalments of durable chestnuts. xXx was a naked bid to establish a parallel franchise to the daddy of all franchises, the 40-years-young Bond series. What was remarkable about xXx was not how different it was from 007, but how aggressively imitative and avowedly similar it was, from pre-credit super stunt to nonchalant bedside quippery.
This American summer also witnessed the rebirth of the Tom Clancy/ Jack Ryan right-wing thriller series with The Sum of All Fears, for which an increasingly wrinkly and doddering Harrison Ford was benched in favour of the whey-faced Ben Affleck. Meanwhile, Affleck’s bull-necked bosom buddy Matt Damon (the two are conjoined at the marketing campaign, and cannot be surgically separated) attempted, with some success, to establish himself in a Robert Ludlum spy-thriller franchise with The Bourne Identity.
The third, madly successful Austin Powers movie rounded out a crop of material directly or indirectly influenced by Ian Fleming and/or Cubby Broccoli. These two totally opposed, yet weirdly synergistic dead men — a desiccated, horny Etonian snob and a thumb-in-the-eye American producer — were without a doubt the guiding spirits behind Hollywood’s 2002 output. And that will only encourage the franchise-happy moneymen, particularly as Die Another Day marks the 40th anniversary of 007. Imagine four decades of xXx or Tomb Raider.
Other franchise bids this summer included Spider Man, now a sure thing, with Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst already signed up for sequel and threequel; and Scooby-Doo, whose cast is now likewise indentured. The tried and tested formulae for Men in Black, Mission: Impossible, Tomb Raider and Analyze This, that and the other will be revived, and most of them look capable of expanding into trilogies without going all Jaws III in 3-D on their backers.
Like pretty much everything else that’s crap about Hollywood today, I blame it all on George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, but especially nerdy George. He conceived the first of the big, stupid trilogies with Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, but, as ever with George, he had to take it all one step further and go messianically skyscraperish. Instead of a trilogy of movies, he conceived a trilogy of trilogies. Since he had a 20-year hiatus between the first three and the next batch, it is conceivable that we could still have the Star Wars millstone round our collective movie-going necks come the 100th anniversary of the Wall Street Crash.
A franchise needs a formula. Simplicity is the primary requirement, and mass appeal the objective. Franchises live or die at the intersection of ”high-concept” (that is, an idea a jockstrap could comprehend) and ”lowest common denominator” (to net massive audiences for whom going to bad movies is a non-political version of voting against their own interests). As ever more franchises darken ever larger regions of the release schedule, they must inevitably become more and more like each other.
If each franchise has a formula, then it stands to reason that out there somewhere in the conceptual ether there is one perfect formula upon which all other formulae, ever in search of greater simplicity and wider appeal, will sooner or later converge. It’s already happened with American automobiles, all of which — the Mustang, the Corvette, the Buick Riviera — look and feel alike today. And it fits in with the ongoing homogenisation of life in the United States and, increasingly, the rest of the world.
Franchise movies are as depressingly insipid and predictable (or as ”dependable”) as Holiday Inn hotel suites, theme parks, resort vacations, department stores or the generic opinions of political candidates and the toneless mendacity of US media reporting. They all offer white-bread, middle-of-the-road ideas entirely lacking in intellectual or emotional nourishment.
One waits for all this debilitating familiarity to start breeding a little constructive contempt, but I’m not holding my breath, because I’ve seen the future — and it’s dumber than a box of rocks. — Â