“Avengers” was not a sequel to Serenity, isn’t really any more similar to it than most action movies are to one another, and the fact Joss Whedon was involved with both isn’t relevant to the topic here. What matters is that Avengers was a continuation of a popular franchise and that fact alone was worth hundreds of millions of dollars. “Serenity” was not a continuation of a popular franchise and would not have made hundreds of millions of dollars no matter how it was marketed.
There just isn’t a reasonable argument to the contrary. Existing franchises make big bucks and so the studios are going to keep making them and SHOULD keep making them, because making money is their primary purpose. If you want something original, maybe you’ll get lucky with the next Marvel movie; “Captain Marvel” looks awful, but maybe the one after that. If you want to place a safer bet on originality and filmmaking skill, “If Beale Street Could Talk” is still in theatres.
If you want something original, watch TV. The roles of TV and movies have flipped. Back in the day, movies were the ‘serious’ media for acting, and TV was for hack actors or people needing a paycheck. ‘Serious’ movie actors wouldn’t go near a TV show for fear of hurting their cachet.
Today, the serious stuff with great plots and great acting are all on TV, and movies have become pulp media full of superheroes and car crashes, with a few political vanity pieces thrown into the mix.
I never said that Avengers was a sequel to Serenity; what I wrote was “Joss Whedon used it as his calling card and template to make the first Avengers film, which essentially maps Serenity beat-for-beat with five times the budget and a better pedigreed cast…” The similarity of the structures of the two films is evident if you lay out the story map of both films side by side. And the notion that Avengers was simply “a continuation of a popular franchise” is given lie by looking at the box office figures for the films that came before it; The Avengers doubled the opening weekend take of the original Iron Man and earned a domestic gross that was more than twice every other film in the franchise to that date, while Thor, Captain America: The First Avenger, and The Incredible Hulk pulled in mediocre yields. In fact, right before The Avengers was released many people were predicting it would bomb due to the excessive weight of having to balance four(?) major characters and that the then-fledgling MCU was afloat only on the charisma of Robert Downey Jr.'s portrayal of Tony Stark.
The point remains that the viewing public can become invested in a new world and franchise if given something worth watching, while just grinding out side-stories in a narrative universe not built for them may give a guaranteed minimum of fanbase loyalty but essentially ensures that the quality will drop and people will become disappointed (unless the studio is trying to appeal to the people who desire to see a robot movie that looks like someone threw a bunch of Hot Wheels into a Blendtec blender).
The world of Star Wars was always designed around “The Force”, and specifically about Luke Skywalker’s journey from whiny farm hand to Force-using hero flyboy to vanquishing his own inner fears and developing a mastery of the Force to rescue his father. The universe does potentially have space for other stories but to ignore “The Force” as non-essential canon is like setting a story in Middle Earth about Rangers of Ithilien building a dam, which might be an interesting story if told well but could be set anywhere.
That’s a great point. Most of the new stuff I’ve enjoyed (and that has what I’m looking for-- interesting stories of Force users), has been the TV stuff.
Yes, if you write a good story, it can click. The audience doesn’t need a franchise in order to enjoy a show and create the next blockbuster phenomenon. Remember, in 1977, Star Wars was a brand new thing.
Franchising is a good bet, and the movie industry is a bunch of cowards whose first instinct is to cover their asses, so we’re going to continue to see a lot of franchising.
I’d heard about Boba Fett being the favorite character and it puzzled me. I guess it makes sense because as a bounty hunter, he could be called upon to go anywhere, do anything in this galaxy far, far away. If you imagined yourself as Boba Fett, you would have plausible justification for fully exploring this new world (Lucas studied anthropology).
So, did they ever make something that mainly follows Boba Fett? Couldn’t a story start with a previous recognized character and then diverge away, sprout from, what was covered in previous movies towards new stories that fit this fictional universe well? It would get the benefit of brand recognition while allowing for creativity.
There was a rumour for a long time that Lucasfilm had planned a Boba Fett movie, in the same vein as Solo, and maybe even directly a continuation of it. But it’s possible they had problems with the story, the continuity, or were scared off by Solo’s box office disappointment, and that it was scrapped, instead re-focusing the same general idea into the new TV series that will be out later this year called The Mandalorian. The main character, played by Pedro Pascal, is not unlike Boba Fett in most ways that count, as far as can be told this far out, so will scratch a lot of the same itches, even if its timeline has been shifted to later (post-Return Of The Jedi by a few years).