I was scrolling through my old posts and found a Top 5 and Bottom 5 Movie Franchises, all the way from 2017, before the world turned on its head by a global pandemic, insane policies made by insane politicians, and a planet that feels far more unhinged and unsafe than it ever has since the end of the WWII. Hollywood has also gone through drastic changes, so I thought I’d take a look at how my Top 5 movie franchises had shifted.
And just a little bit of a preview…. Oh how the mighty have fallen.
To set the stage, my Top 5 franchises in 2017 were:
5. Star Trek
4. Star Wars
3. Jurassic Park
2. Jason Bourne
1, Marvel Cinematic Universe
My old post went into a bit of detail why each of these ranked so high. Fast forward 6,5 years, and a lot has changed… and not for the better.
STAR TREK
Despite the focus of this blog, I have to say Star Trek has unfortunately fallen off my favorite franchises list. Never mind that the last Trek movie wasn’t exactly good, but the entire JJ Abrams reboot has gone dead since 2016. The Star Trek torch has been mainly carried by a plethora of TV shows of varying quality, but none of those seemed particularly impactful. Case-in-point, as much as I enjoyed Season 3 of Picard, the appeal there was not moving the Star Trek story forward — it was heavily drawing on TNG nostalgia and closing the book on the TNG crew with a proper sendoff.
And then you have the utter train-wrecks like Discovery — granted, I didn’t originally have the burning hatred of Discovery like Fungi, but my resentment for it definitely grew as the show went on… not necessarily because of the political messaging and social agenda pushing, but because it started to crap all over the in-universe rules and limitations, and the level of Mary-Sueing was nauseating.
TNG is my Star Trek. With their “official retirement”, the new stuff holds very little interest for me.
STAR WARS
Disney and Lucasfilm-without-Lucas seem to be in a whole heap of trouble in recent years, and the failure of Star Wars is a big part of it. At one point it’s almost unimaginable that the cultural phenomenon that is Star Wars would fail at the box office, but they’ve managed the impossible!
My love for Star Wars goes back decades to my childhood, but that love didn’t quite extend to the Prequels. No, I found the acting and dialogue in the Prequels awkward and uncomfortable, the CGI visuals overdone, the story felt forced in many parts, and overall a lot less charming than the Original Trilogy. Little did I realize that compared to the Sequels, the Prequels were actually far more palatable. Somehow the Sequels managed to make the Galaxy Far, Far Away feel smaller in scale, with a story that felt painfully contrived, terribly predictable, and frankly joyless.
Disney also decided to flood their streaming service with Star Wars content — and yes, hold on to this thought, as it’ll come up again — with wildly varying quality. The first two seasons of The Mandalorian were widely acclaimed, and even managed to briefly light a glimmer of hope for the franchise during the reign of the Sequels. But other spinoff shows like Book of Boba Fett, Obi-Wan, Ashoka and Andor rolled off the production line, and… okay, some were better than others, but has Disney/Lucasfilm not learned from Solo? Stop digging up fan-favorite characters and dropping them into stories that change them “for a modern audience”. There are some stories that are best left untold — Han Solo was cool on his own, there was no need to explain every bit of random dialogue that he uttered. Boba Fett was cool because he was mysterious and looked badass, so don’t give him a redemption arc and make him a softie. Obi-Wan went from a young Jedi to an old hermit; we don’t need to know what he did in the 20 years in-between. There’s a lot to be said about leaving things to the imagination.
With the recent announcement that Disney may want to further the Sequel story with additional movies… well, count me out. I really have no interest in seeing more of the Sequel universe.
JURASSIC PARK
Look, I still love the premise of Jurassic Park. But the last couple of movies past Jurassic World have really pushed the narrative past the point of sustainability. There’s really only so much people being eaten by dinosaurs you can… err, stomach. The last one came out in 2022 *Jurassic World – Dominion* and dinosaurs weren’t even the main focus! Like both Star Trek and Star Wars, it drew heavily on audience nostalgia and brought back the original cast of Jurassic Park, reuniting Alan Grant, Ellie Sattler and Ian Malcolm, but not really utilizing them in meaningful ways.
I honestly feel dinosaurs-eating-humans is played out. Just let it retire peacefully.
JASON BOURNE
The Bourne franchise seems to have ended — the last movie came out in 2016 and there has been no more whispers of it. Which, frankly, I’m fine with. Jason Bourne’s story is finished and wrapped up; dragging it out unnecessarily would just make it another Jurassic Park. I am just as happy to go watch the old movies instead of worrying about how they would wreck another excellent franchise.
MARVEL CINEMATIC UNIVERSE
For my previously top movie franchise, the MCU has fallen precipitously.
When I made the Top 5 list in 2017, the MCU hasn’t even hit its peak yet. With 2018’s Infinity War and 2019’s Endgame, the MCU crested and was mopping the floor with everything else out there. After Endgame, the MCU immediately floundered. Not surprising, given the franchise lost several of its central characters – Iron Man, Captain America, and Black Widow. The subsequent flood of subpar Disney+ Marvel shows definitely did more damage than help the franchise – I mean, I watched WandaVision and Hawkeye, caught a bit of Falcon and the Winter Soldier but that couldn’t hold my attention, tried to watch Loki but couldn’t get past the second episode, and even tried Moonknight but honestly I remember absolutely nothing of it. So I ended up straight up ignoring the rest. As for the movies… well, they were just as disappointing if not more so. Thor: Love and Thunder was a complete farce, Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness expanded the multiverse theme which lowered the stakes of everything, Antman: Quantumania was a hodgepodge of WTF? Even Wakanda Forever, despite winning acclaim, felt…. unnecessary. Really, why was Namor even attacking Wakanda? It made no sense.
Sadly, the post-Endgame MCU has fallen so low for me, it’s starting to edge into my least favorite franchises category. There is a bit of lesson to be learned here, though. If you look carefully, the failings of modern Star Trek, Star Wars and Marvel (along with another popular franchise that Disney scooped up — Indiana Jones) have a few things in common:
- Replacing old heroes with new ones, and expecting the audience to love them immediately – No, that doesn’t work. You can’t make people adore a hero without putting in the work. People don’t love Iron Man, they love Tony Stark. They don’t love Sam Wilson just because he takes over the name of Captain America, because he didn’t go through the trials and struggles of Steve Rogers. Fans don’t love Rey just because they’re told she’s the heroine, carries Luke’s lightsaber and takes on the Skywalker name, and fans don’t love Helena Shaw because she takes Indiana Jones’ hat. Old heroes are heroes because of their past actions and adventures, and you can’t just replace them willy-nilly. It’s unfortunate, because some of these new characters have the potential to carry their franchise forward — I’m looking at Star Wars’ Rey, Finn and Poe, especially — but the writing did them a terrible disservice.
- Shitting all over old heroes – Yes, even worse than number 1 above, taking old heroes and make them look outdated and stupid. See how Picard was abused in the first two seasons of his own show; look at how pathetic they made Luke Skywalker in the sequels. And gosh, don’t even start on what a loser Old Man Indy was. Putting down old heroes to make your new cast look good is the first degree of MARY SUE. Really? Spock was pining for his HUMAN half-sister? Helena Shaw is better in every way than Indiana Jones? Honestly, the fastest way to piss off an audience is to take their childhood heroes and shit all over them.
- You have ONE JOB: to Entertain your customers – A lot of corporations have been hot and heavy with their political and social agenda, and it shows in everything they do. They seem to have forgotten that they are first and foremost an entertainment company and they need to entertain — not attempt to brainwash the audience into their way of thinking. At the end of the day, we’re there to be entertained, not to be talked down to, insulted and told to change our beliefs. Look at the success of Top Gun: Maverick — it stuck to its guns and focused on simple entertainment. In contrast, look at the shitstorm of controversy with Amazon’s Rings of Power — they decided to make massive changes to Tolkien’s classics for the sake of sociopolitical pandering, and blamed it on the fans for not liking it. Did they forget the fans are the paying customers? When a studio makes something that doesn’t entertain the fans, they can only blame themselves for the failure.
- Quantity over Quality – The last few years has seen a FLOOD of content for Star Trek, Star Wars and MCU, a lot of which were not good. No, quantity doesn’t equate quality; in fact, quantity seems to have diluted quality for these franchises. The whole “let’s throw shit at the wall and see what sticks” strategy is a double-edged sword; audience can quickly grow tired of seeing subpar content and lose interest/faith in a franchise. Whatever happened to focusing on a project and delivering quality?
- Poor Storytelling – This is a bit of a catch-all, but poor storytelling is also one of the main downfall of the franchises. As examples, I will point prominently at Star Trek Discovery’s storylines, where they crap all over established Star Trek lore and in-universe rules to appear more “groundbreaking”. NO, THAT IS NOT HOW WARP WORKS. I will point at the inexplicable rise of the First Order in Star Wars, and the frigging THOUSAND DEATH-STAR-LEVEL STAR-DESTROYER FLEET. I will point at MCU’s shift to the multiverse, where hey, Earth doesn’t really matter cuz it’s just one of billions. If someone dies, who cares? There’s a billion more versions out there you can pull from. With some notable exceptions (i.e. The Mandalorian), so many of today’s writers and directors seem more concerned with “leaving their marks” on an IP rather than telling a good story, and a lot of them even openly admit they weren’t very familiar with the franchises they were hired to work on. I mean, isn’t that an obvious problem right there?
So yes, this post is very ranty, but I’ve been so disappointed by the failures of my favorite franchises in the span of 6 and a half years. How do they manage to fail so spectacularly, in so short a time? Hollywood appears to be running out of ideas, and in the face of a creative drought, they’ve decided to go back to the old wells but instead of drinking, they peed into the wells.
Heidy's Highly Wily MMORPG Blog 