Culture Crash: The Never-Ending Movie Franchises

A few weeks ago, I re-watched The Bourne Identity for the first time in years after listening to Matt Damon discuss the production of that movie, where he mentioned that they made the movie essentially as a standalone picture. According to Damon, they didn’t really expect it to be a big hit, so it was a surprise to him when they were all brought back and made it into a franchise.

Watching it under this lens, I realized for the first time that it really does work on its own. For a long time, this is how all kinds of movies were made. With the recent release of No Time to Die, I like many others have also revisited some Bond titles, and for much of that franchise’s existence, they were basically just adventure of the week films. You didn’t need to follow the arc of James Bond or Jason Bourne’s lives. Now, we have the MCU-ification of moviemaking, where to understand a new Spider-Man movie, you should have intimate knowledge of 20 other movies and a handful of Disney+ miniseries. And frankly, I find that to be kind of exhausting. The magic of movies is that they are contained. A movie is two or three hours, and then it ends. But now, they’re more like mega-miniseries installments.

All of this is to say that I am more excited by Matt Reeves’ forthcoming movie, The Batman, than I am for any MCU movie or new Avatar installment of whatever. The Batman is reportedly a standalone movie. It’s not an origin story or a finale, it’s just a movie about a pre-existing Batman. Now I’m sure there will be sequels,  but even a series of two or three movies now is a breath of fresh air from the weight of Star Wars Episode 9 and the like. With The Batman, I hope they don’t even bother with the origin story that every casual moviegoer has seen time and time again by now. Just let us watch Batman for a few hours and go on our way. Just let me watch a Bond movie, or a Spider-Man movie, or Fast and the Furious movie, and then move on with my life. Instead of tracking down all of the Nightmare on Elm Streets or Terminator movies, sometimes it’s easier to just watch Inception. It begins, it middles, and it ends. It’s a thing of beauty. I’m reaching franchise fatigue. Give me back the standalone movies.