Is all this Universe sharing really necessary?

[Fuffy Baith]

Is universe sharing necessary? No. Do I like it when done right? Yes! I'm a big fan of the Marvel movies. And I'm curious to see what Fox is going to do with their XzMen universe. After seeing Wonder Woman, I'm more hopefully for the DC universe. While I'm not a big Godzilla fan, I've only seen the 2014 movie and that was good, but not great. I loved King Kong! The movie was alright, but Kong was awesome! So I'll give that monster universe a try.

As for the Universal Dark Universe, I've not seen any of the old movie monster movies. They did announce recently that they were going to add The Phantom of the Opera and The Hunchback of Notre Dame to their movies. Plus they got Russel Crowe as Dr. Jekyll that's going to be in these movies. I think the problem right now, is what is Universal's goals with these movies? What are they building up to? What are they trying to do differently with the use movies than previous ones? I've not seen the new The Mummy but it's not getting great reviews. I think the next movie they got planned is The Bride of Frankenstein. Which is going to be directed by Bill Condon, who just did Beauty and the Beast. I'm not sure about Johnny Depp as the Invisible Man. There's some fan talk about whether or not they'll redo The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with these new actors. Is that start Universal is building to or Monster Squad team up? I think if they have a vision for this universe then I need to know what it is in order to get excited for it.

Marvel did it the right way by having a few movies that did well, building up character growth and development, and then announcing a shared universe aspect and bringing the team together on The Avengers

That's what I line about Marvel Phase 1 movies, they are all (mostly) stand alone movies. While I think the quality of the movies have gotten better, it's also gotten really crowed with characters. That's why I'm really excited for Black Panther, we get to see a lot of new characters.

I guess a slightly unpopular opinion is that I really liked what they did with Prometheus

I saw Prometheys in theatres before I had seen any of the other Alien movies, so I'm a little bias,but i Saw it again recently and I still enjoy it as a movie that takes place in the Alien universe but is not directly connected. I've not seen Alien Covenant yet.

(does anyone even remember 2010's Wolfman?

Yes, I saw that. It was boring and not nearly enough werewolf stuff. I think a lot of people have forgotten about that movie. But there have been so many movies with werewolves in them, maybe the general movie audience is not interested. There's been so many remakes or other versions of these monsters that it might be hard to get the audience to care about this new universe. The last two movies about Frankenstein didn't do very good. The last couple of Dracula movies have not done good (Anyone remember Gerard Butler in Dracula 2000?). I'm with @Athena I like the Brendan Fraser Mummy movies (I life the 3rd one too!). They are just fun adventure movies with a little bit of horror elements that scared me as a kid. The new Mummy changes it to a female and looks a little bit more on the horror side, but still lacks a clear vision of what is going to set this movie apart from the others. I'll see when I watch the movie, but the trailers just weren't that great.

I also think that they went the wrong route with The Mummy. They should have made this Monsters Universe a series of mid-budgeted horror films instead of Tom Cruise action films

I agree. I don't mind adding action but I do think they should have kept it a smaller budget film. Not a "Tom Cruise" action movie which is what it looks like from the trailer.

 

[white avenger]

I don't want to see Batman/Bruce Waye in a Wonder Woman film. I don't want to see Iron Man in a Spiderman film etc...

And I have zero interest in these monster movie reboots, yet alone the crossovers. Thoughts?

Personally, I like the crossovers and team ups in the Marvel, and now the DC Universes/ It just seems to make sense that, if a big enough menace arises, all of the heroes in a particular reality would team up to take care of the problem. I'm reserving my comments on things like "King Kong Meets Godzilla" and the various Universal Studios crossovers, but, if the story line makes sense, why not? Werewolves and vampires have been interacting well for decades. I'm not so sure about tossing a mummy into the mix, but, who knows? It may be great.

As long as the individual characters are within the same genre, I'm okay with it. Mixing genres, like "Cowboys vs Aliens" just doesn't work for me.

 

[Ethan Reigns]

Back to the original question about the universe - movies are not made to garner critical acclaim, they are made to make money. Like the hit parade in music (which was inspired by observing people choosing the same few songs on a jukebox with many songs), people keep wanting to go back to familiar things. We will continue to get remakes and rehashes and reworks of familiar things because they are a known quantity and people look for them. Marvel has done some good movies because they had good characters to start with. DC has more of an uphill battle here.

 

[Fuffy Baith]

I have just discovered there was a 1959 "The Mummy" movie with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee by Hammer Films. And just a few years ago there was The Mummy Resurrected in 2014. So there's more Mummy movies than I thought.

Has anyone seen the comedy Transylvania 6-5000 with Jeff Goldblum and Ed Begley, jr? That's a good kinda spoof movie on some of the classic movie monsters.

 

[white avenger]

Has anyone seen the comedy Transylvania 6-5000 with Jeff Goldblum and Ed Begley, jr? That's a good kinda spoof movie on some of the classic movie monsters.

Yeah, I saw it, and, while I didn't think that it was at as as good as "Love At First Bite," "Young Frankenstein," or "Dracula, Dead And Loving It," I still think that it was a good, funny movie. Mixing comedy and horror, if done well, is one of the examples of genre mixing that can actually work quite well (as any "Buffy" fan knows quite well.

Speaking of comedy/horror crossovers, have you ever seen "Abbot & Costello Meet The Wolf Man?" It was, I think, the first such crossover, and actually used the classic actors, Lon Chaney, Bela Lugosi, and Glen Strange as the wolf man, Dracula, and Frankenstein, respectively, plus the voice of Vincent Price as the invisible man in the last few moments of the movie.

 

[Guy]

Do I like the trend of cinematic universes? Yes. Why? Because cinematic universes are cinema's best way of trying to compete with television.

Here's the thing: Cinema is inferior to television as a way of telling stories. It just is. Television allows for longer, more complex stories, with more creative plots and characters and themes. Television (at its best) brings cinema to the level of literature.
For much of the 20th century, Television was considered inferior to cinema artistically, because the technology of TV held the medium back, but in the last few decades technology came to the point that it allowed TV to do almost everything that cinema does - and once that happened, all the structural advantages of TV could finally come into play.
Now we can get TV stories like 'Breaking Bad', which make almost all of the popular movies of recent years look like crap by comparison. Popular TV is in its "golden age" today (And not just according to me), while popular cinema is under constant criticism for being creatively bankrupt - it's criticized for being too reboot-heavy, for being too remake-heavy, for being too nostalgia-heavy, for being too spectacle-heavy, etc...
Popular Television is thriving, while popular cinema is dying.

And how could cinema possibly compete with the inherent advantages of television? By trying to imitate TV's inherent advantage - length.

By working in cinematic universes, cinema can do everything that makes modern TV so compelling - it can create more complex plots, it can create more complex characters and character arcs, it can tackle more complex themes, it can tackle genres in more complex ways... It can simply make better, more complex stories!

This is especially true for comic-book adaptations - comic books are generally a serialized form of storytelling, and because of this, cinematic universes are simply a better vehicle for comic-book adaptations than standalone movies.

So... Why do so many cinematic universes SUCK? Well, for two reasons:

1) Because so many MOVIES suck today. The entire medium is in decline, as I said. So yeah, 'Batman v Superman' is an example of a crappy cinematic universe film, but 'Man of Steel' is an example of an entirely standalone film (which was NOT intended to launch a cinematic universe at the time, BTW) which also sucked.

2) Because cinematic universes are still new, in the grand scheme of things. The first truly successful example of a cinematic universe film was 'The Avengers' in 2012 - just 5 years ago. Considering the fact that most popular movies take around 2-3 years to make, this isn't a long time at all. Most movie studios are still LEARNING this new way of making movies, and a learning process involves mistakes. Even Marvel is on a learning curve - after the gamble-y surprise success of 'The Avengers', they fumbled a lot with 'Age of Ultron'... But then they succeeded beautifully with 'Civil War'. Marvel is still exploring this new way of making blockbusters too.

And I think that when this way DOES work, it's totally worth it - 'Civil War' absolutely astounded me with its complexity of characters and themes, because I'm used to only seeing this level of complexity in TV, not in cinema. With that movie, cinematic universes finally showed how they can compete with the complexity of popular television. That film reminded me of some of my favorite episodes from shows like 'Buffy' and 'Breaking Bad' and 'Game of Thrones', and it's something that I almost never see in regular standalone popular films.

So, yeah - cinematic universes get a thumbs up from me. They are the future.

I just got round to watching Captain America: Civil War yesterday and I must admit, there were times when I was really struggling to remember what was happening with certain characters and who was relevant to which stories and which movie. Then they were adding new characters as well and I was going "okay, so have I met this person... no, this one is new, okay."
I worked it all out, but the friend I was watching it with was completely confused through a lot of it. I personally like having the connections, but I do think it's getting to the point where it could put off some of the more casual viewers.

That's funny, because this is exactly how I felt about the first 'Avengers' film - I did watch superhero movies at the time, but I wasn't really a big FAN of the genre, so I wasn't really aware that that film was supposed to be a big unprecedented team-up thing. And as a result, 'The Avengers' was really WEIRD to me - I didn't watch the first Cap and Hulk films, so that movie was my introduction to them (which worked well for Hulk, but did NOT work for Cap. My first impression of Steve Rogers was "who's this bully-ish asshole who constantly wants to get into punching contests with Tony, and why do people act like HE'S the responsible one?!" Which is pretty hilarious in retrospect), and when Iron Man entered the film I was genuinely shocked ("what does this engineer guy have to do with a freaking GOD like Loki?!"), and I was somehow even MORE surprised when Thor joined (for some reason, I forgot that Loki and Thor were, like, brothers. LOL. I blame Loki's new haircut!).

But by the time 'Civil War' came out, I was already totally immersed in the genre, and NOTHING about that film was confusing to me. And I love the fact that the movie didn't try to downplay the size of the universe - this was Marvel's 13th film, and by that time it was completely illogical to cater these films to casual fans' tastes. The way I see it, 'Civil War' is the film in which the MCU finally embraced what it is - which is why we now start to see crossovers all the time ('Spiderman: Homecoming' will have Iron Man, 'Thor: Ragnarok' will have the Hulk, etc...). And that's a good thing.

As long as the individual characters are within the same genre, I'm okay with it. Mixing genres, like "Cowboys vs Aliens" just doesn't work for me.

Umm... 'The Avengers' combined the sci-fi of Iron Man with the war film of Captain America, and the horror movie of the Hulk, and the fantasy epic of Thor, and the spy thriller of Black Widow. Genre combinations can totally work.

And isn't the character of Han Solo essentially a Cowboy, who just happens to fight aliens?

 

[Athena]

As long as the individual characters are within the same genre, I'm okay with it. Mixing genres, like "Cowboys vs Aliens" just doesn't work for me.

Mixing genres can be just fine as long as it's done right. Movies are supposed to take you into a fantastical world. Cowboys vs Aliens was a hot mess of a movie though, so no that did not work!

As @Guy said, The Avengers mixes genre characters really well. 🙂
 
Also, great article on Den of Geek today about announcing multiple sequels before your movie's come out.... 😉

The folly of announcing sequels before your movie’s out

 

[The Bronze]

That's a great post @Guy, hadn't thought of it that way before. It's going to be hard to replicate TV success with the length of time between films though.

 

[white avenger]

Umm... 'The Avengers' combined the sci-fi of Iron Man with the war film of Captain America, and the horror movie of the Hulk, and the fantasy epic of Thor, and the spy thriller of Black Widow. Genre combinations can totally work.

But they all fall under the umbrella of "superhero," which is a different thing entirely. Even when you add the mystical element of Dr Strange, as they will be doing in the next Avengers movie, these characters are all part of a single established reality, or, at least, they are all worked and integrated into the same universe. (Or maybe it's just that I grew up accepting all of these characters as contemporaries so I'm used to it already) The same thing just wouldn't work for me if Steve McGarrett on "Hawaii Five O" was taking a day off at the beach., and Godzilla came wading ashore. Crossovers can work if you can successfully avoid the "Aw, COME ON" factor.

 

[Guy]

Also, great article on Den of Geek today about announcing multiple sequels before your movie's come out.... 😉

The folly of announcing sequels before your movie’s out

Yeah, the movie announcements should really be reigned back.

That's a great post @Guy, hadn't thought of it that way before. It's going to be hard to replicate TV success with the length of time between films though.

Which is why the cinematic universes should still be more episodic than serialized. A cinematic universe should be structured more like season 3 of 'Buffy', and less like season 5 of 'Buffy'.

But they all fall under the umbrella of "superhero," which is a different thing entirely. Even when you add the mystical element of Dr Strange, as they will be doing in the next Avengers movie, these characters are all part of a single established reality, or, at least, they are all worked and integrated into the same universe. (Or maybe it's just that I grew up accepting all of these characters as contemporaries so I'm used to it already) The same thing just wouldn't work for me if Steve McGarrett on "Hawaii Five O" was taking a day off at the beach., and Godzilla came wading ashore. Crossovers can work if you can successfully avoid the "Aw, COME ON" factor.

It needs to be set up well, yes. But I think that could be done with ANY combination of genres, as long as the writers and directors are smart.