For filmgoers (and critics) who don't keep up with every Marvel project, are only casual 'Star Wars' fans or missed the Harry Potter train, mainstream movie culture has become frustratingly exclusionary.
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Movies were once inviting. Ticket-holders didnt need to skim Wikipedia entries before getting in their car because they could follow a story from the start to its end. Sure, sequels and remakes have been around for more than a century, but the past decade has seen their takeover of the multiplex (in most of America, the only kind of theater around) and a corresponding rise in the exclusionary nature of mainstream film culture.
As the media and entertainment industries continue to fragment, blockbusters like Wonder Woman and Get Out have remained one of the few cultural products we can all watch and discuss (and argue about) together. And so theres something enormously dispiriting about the current transformation of our public square into a clubhouse, where the bar for entry gets higher with each new franchise installment. Disneys not marching anyone into MCU Summer School at gunpoint but viewers who dont keep up with Marvels annual output (three features this year) are at risk of being confused when they do drop into the overstuffed cinematic universes, or of being shut out of a significant chunk of pop culture altogether.
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But todays fan-centric culture is a raw deal for the rest of us. The long-running complaints against franchise culture especially regarding the studios self-repetition are thoroughly earned. Wonder Woman, The Fast and the Furious movies and the Star Wars episodes The Force Awakens and Rogue One are some examples of how greater gender, racial and LGBTQ inclusion has breathed some new air into familiar universes (while garnering some heartwarming PR). The passionate reaction to Wonder Woman, especially the tear-eliciting scenes of women in combat, has proven the need for a superheroine film. But for all its virtues, Patty Jenkins movie looks and feels a lot like every other comic-book adaptation. And as welcome as Reys ascendance as The Chosen One is in The Force Awakens, the installment is practically a beat-for-beat facsimile of A New Hope, the original Star Wars movie. Franchise fatigue may or may not be real, but theres no question that the prevailing sequel/remake/spinoff trend has pushed original ideas in studio filmmaking to the margins.
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Just as dismal is the reality that the industry is essentially training us in how to be entertained. The Marvel Cinematic Universe, for example, has created a new kind of viewer: One that searches for connective narrative tissue from film to film across what is planned to be dozens of features. Again, if you enjoy that particular way of engaging with a franchise, thats great. But Disney evidently hopes to make casual fans into (possibly grudging) devotees. One of Spider-Man: Homecomings main draws is its relatively fresh starting point. But the studios ambition is for a casual Spider-Fan to eventually check out all six of the films in which Holland is contracted to play New Yorks dorkiest swinger. And thats just one filmic iteration of a single character.
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The geeks have inherited the Earth with the maneuvering of the studios, and together theyve put up a wall between the corporate-designed fandom and everybody else. If the wall has to be there, I wish the door to get through wasnt so frustratingly high and getting higher every few months. Theres definitely a lot of us out here. So why does it feel so lonely?
