Which movie series will still be going a popular in 2050? 2100?
Star Wars ?
Star Trek ?
James Bond Movies ?
Lord of the Rings ?
Marvel Super Heros ?
DC SuperHeros ?
Fast and Furious ?
Rocky ?
Harry Potter ?
Air Bud
Star Trek might continue another fifty years. Science Fiction stories can easily adapt to new technology and whatever the future brings. They’ll have to move onto entirely new characters and ship designs.
James Bond seems to have run it’s course. A cold war spy makes less and less sense. I’d be quite surprised if they get even another ten years out of the series.
I quit watching Bond films 15 years ago. I know the current guy, Daniel Craig has revived interest. That’s why I think it’ll last another decade.
I plan to watch one of Craig’s Bond films and see how good it is.
Avatar 12 and Terminator 26, most likely.
Will there still be movies in 2100?
Marvel movies will still be going strong in 2050. With whatever actors are still alive back then using CGI makeup to look like 30-somethings, and the rest will be CGI avatars. By then Disney Omnicorp will be the only ones allowed to create entertainment, so expect Marvel, Pixar, Universal, Sony, Dreamworks and all the other Disney subsidiaries to rehash their old propierties over and over.
in 2100 “movies” will have been replaced by interactive stories streamed in the brain. Disneygoogle Corp. will create them.
I disagree. One, the Cold War, arguably, has been revived. Two, espionage will ALWAYS be interesting, insomuch as a lot of it consists of clever technological tricks and psychological mind games, and those themes never go out of style. Three, the idea of a character undergoing constant re-incarnation by different actors offers endless possibilities for a variety of different takes on James Bond. Much more so, I might add, than any superhero character, because his personality and wits are more important than anything he can physically do. (This is not to say that the physical element isn’t important - and that, too, offers the possibility of multiple interesting variations.)
Bond has most decidedly not run his course!!
Compared to ‘superheroes’, though, Bond is still a limited concept.
Take the Marvel Cinematic Universe: they can of course do a WWII movie built around Captain America parachuting behind enemy lines to liberate POWs; just like how we can speculate as to whether they’ll kill off Captain America in the next flick.
But will they give us a Bond movie set in WWII? Are they going to kill off Bond partway through the next flick? Will they do a Bond movie with Viking deities up in Asgard? You can probably do a Black Widow movie with whatever a Bond movie would; but can Bond headline a light comedy about a jailbreak for a talking raccoon and a tree-man? How about a flick where top billing goes to the guy playing a high-school student hoping to ask a pretty girl to the homecoming dance?
ANT-MAN got touted as a heist movie: from the trailer, there’s an ex-con trying to go straight, but a guy who knows a guy talks him into pulling a big job with well-timed teamwork, and there’s some self-deprecating humor and some fight scenes for when stealth alone can’t carry the day. And that’s as much an MCU superhero movie as one where an up-and-coming sorcerer learns the ins and outs of time travel?
I guess there may be limitations imposed by the Fleming Estate, but I can’t see why they can’t do James Bond spin-offs like a Q movie, an M movie, or even a Moneypenny movie. There are presumably at least nine other Double-0 agents they could draw from too, finally using some of those dream casting names like Idris Elba or Tom Hiddleston or Chris Hemsworth, or Gillian Anderson or Saoirse Ronan. I do wonder why the “shared universe” thing everybody is so desperate to do these days has not been mooted for Bond.
None.
Assuming you’re not kidding, I expect the current series of Marvel movies will have worn out their welcome well before 2025, let alone 2050. In a few years, people will tire of these movies and move onto something else. The Infinity War movie coming out might just be the beginning of the end.
“Simpsons has really gone downhill since Season 81.”
It has been discussed. Ian Fleming contributed a few ideas to the project that eventually became The Man from U.N.C.L.E. It might have been a shared universe, but Saltzman and Broccoli did not want to share. More recently, there was talk of Halle Berry’s character from Die Another Day and Michelle Yeoh’s character from Tomorrow Never Dies getting their own movies.
But my point is, all of those are still skilled-operative-with-gimmicks characters: they play cat burglar, they use martial arts, they excel at car chases, they flirt with attractive members of the opposite sex, they pull off incredible feats of pistol marksmanship; basically, they do James Bond stuff.
Now, there’s room for that – Tom Cruise keeps churning out MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE flicks, Charlize Theron just did ATOMIC BLONDE, that KINGSMAN franchise seems to have some real momentum, and so on. But while you can pretty much do that kind of story as a superhero movie, James Bond doesn’t really lend himself to alien-invasion stories or shrink-ray stories or time-travel stories or whatever.
Heck, probably the most bankable superhero around is just a brainy ninja who (a) has the best equipment money can buy, and (b) wears a tuxedo when catching the eye of this or that hot chick. But while you can fit Bruce Wayne into the James Bond mold, you can’t just as readily work that formula in reverse.
Basically any movie concept that doesn’t rely on a specific actor can continue indefinitely. Rocky probably is done when Stallone dies. I don’t see Terminator surviving past Arnie. But Star Trek and Star Wars have robust universes that will probably always be good fodder for storytelling. SAme with superhero films, although it’s unlikely we’ll have the golden age we have now in 2050. While I think reports of a superhero bubble are overblown, I don’t think the market will bear two major universes producing multiple movies each year for long. More likely we’ll see a return to the pre-MCU days, where there’s 2-3 films a year in that genre. But I think there will be Superman, Batman, and X-men movies in 2050 and beyond, no question.
Bond has lasted this long, what’s another 30 years?
Fast and Furious is dependent on our love affair with cars. By 2050 we’ll all be in self driving cars at the very least, so the whole concept of car chases might be foreign to most viewers. Do we pay big money to watch horseback chases?
Harry Potter, it’s hard to see anything quality being produced without Rawling. We’ve probably seen the end of that.
I keep hearing this, year after year.
Me, i think that, for better or worse, the era of big multimedia franchises is barely starting.
Dr Who. (OK it isn’t a movie series, but it is the longest lived)
Sherlock Holmes - canon and derivative.
I agree James Bond will continue.
People enjoy stories, and telling stories is easier when you have a working character and setting. The value of that can’t be overestimated. Movies are a mature medium. You can go to a movie house and - in principle - enjoy a movie made 50 years ago just as much as a new release. Sure big action CGI stuff is new, but the intrinsic medium of story telling has been well understood for well over 50 years, and it is unlikely it will change dramatically. The movie theater has barely changed (in terms of the experience) in that time. Once you pretty well fill up the available bandwidth with sight and sound there is little else to do. Probably home theatre will continue to rise in importance, and we might expect the manner in which made for streaming movies and series have become another stream to take a significant slice of Hollywood’s action. But the core medium is unchanged.
Another thing that keeps these going is basically nostalgia. People who enjoyed Bond/Star Wars etc as a kid will be drawn to new releases, and they enjoy the continuing story or stories as they grow. It becomes part of their life, and they pass this on to their kids. Kids going to see The Last Jedi today will cheerfully go see the death star blown up yet again in 2050 or later, and probably take their kids.
Same with Bond. The last few films have rather reinvented Bond, and the flexibility and appeal in the core character for story telling has become quite significant. It hasn’t been about the cold war for ages.
That’s a little different; there will still be big multimedia franchises (which is hardly a new thing). But I think the current fad for big-budget superhero movies will end.
By 2100, I suspect Hollywood will have tried to reboot and revive most existing franchises at least once. I’m sure some of the attempts at revival will fail. Think of all the times they tried to revive the Tarzan franchise; there have been several and none of them have lead to the same success as one in the thirties with Johnny Weismuller. Just a few years ago they tried to revive the Lone Ranger in that horrible movie with Armand Hammer and Johnny Depp. I think a more interesting question is what franchises has Hollywood not tried to revive? Did they ever try to revive Rin Tin Tin or Francis the Talking Mule?
Tarzan is an interesting example; the first movie mentioned in the Wikipedia article is from 1918, so that’s just about a hundred years. And the earliest Sherlock Holmes films are more than a hundred years old. And I’ll bet they’ll be making movies based on Shakespeare plays a hundred years from now.
But that’s very different from saying the current Marvel or Star Trek series will still be in production that much in the future. (Heck, they will probably find our current science fiction quaint and completely wrong.)