Each new entry in a franchise is contagious against old entries in two ways
1. It typically carves out new canon about its universe, and
2. Closes old loose ends
Canon when added haphazardly can:
A. retroactively create in-universe plot-holes (if X existed in the universe, then Y happening in the originals made no sense, they would have known about it),
B. remove magic and mystery from an existing universe (famously in Star Wars’ case, quite literally, because now “The Force” is a bunch of little biological creatures) or
C. otherwise trivialize what were previously key moments (someone who was portrayed as a big bad previously was later just shown to be some powerless, boring low-level lackey who was irrelevant)
Additionally, loose end patching is infectious to older entries of a story:
A. When an older work presents a mystery, when you have a solution in a later work and that solution is lame, it taints the original by the knowledge that the loose end is, forever after, a broken promise by the writers.
B. It typically crowds out the potential of better solutions later (typically in film, franchises have to reboot to backtrack on canon),
C. prevents the solution from being the potentially better “that’s just where the story ends, use your imagination for what happens next!”, and
D. makes it retroactively hard as a fan to justify recommending the series to new fans, because if they feel passionate too, you know there’s no light at the end of the tunnel for incoming fans, since you know how it ends and know that it’s not rewarding.
I enjoyed watching the best show of all time. (Of course I did!) Up until Firefly got canceled, anyway, which was enormously frustrating. But at least I got to keep the sense of mystery and the potential of big reveals.
Then they made Serenity. Which I enjoyed, don't get me wrong. But I had to do some mental gymnastics to treat it as something other than a continuation. I had to think of it as its own thing, and then I could be okay with treating it as a good movie.
But it wrapped up several loose ends up a wholly unsatisfying way. If that was what the original series was leading up to, then I could no longer care when re-watching or just thinking about the series. It wasn't so much wrapping up loose ends as snipping them off. It was a 90° turn into a different story. So I treated it that way, and it was really nice when my kids were old enough that we could watch the series together and accept that it terminated abruptly at the last created episode.
Indiana Jones, as a franchise, mostly exists to present-day audiences as a series of Harrison Ford movies. Which, to sidecar a bit, seems like a shame when the point and click titles made by the Monkey Island folks were absolutely fantastic. I'd say Fate of Atlantis is a way better 4th installment than Crystal Skull.
But at any rate, following up a movie generally viewed as mediocre with what's shaping up to be one of the most expensive box office failures of all time after a delay of many years seems like it could only damage any lingering value in this IP. If it's not outright "murdering" the franchise, I'd say Disney has left Indiana Jones in a much worse spot than it was 20 years ago, and not just because the original movies are 20 years older.
Revisited Fate of Atlantis recently and was just reminded of the awesome rollercoaster in Disneyland, and it is kind of mystifying how this entire franchise was apparently allowed to slip away from relevance. Not just in movies - The Uncharted games are fantastic, the new Tomb Raiders sold many copies, people want swashbuckling adventures and the market's been saturated with milsims and scifi for years. The last 20 years of the franchise just look like one big missed opportunity parade.
20 years is a bad comparison point for "did Disney kill Indiana Jones." Disney bought Lucas just over 11 years ago. So what was the shape of the franchise at that point?
After a well-received film in 1989 and a well-received but niche Fate of Atlantis video game in 1992, and a TV series for a year or so (so not a smashing success, though I remember people liking it) in 1992-1993) it went dark movies/TV-wise, and none of the followup video games amounted to too much.
So the franchise wasn't in great shape or popular relevance pre-Crystal Skull, and that film certainly didn't help. It was largely disliked by audiences, and Dial of Destiny actually seems better received by audiences so far. Personally I thought it was a far better film, though not a "must see" - but how much blood is in that stone to squeeze out with an aging Harrison Ford compared to, say, Uncharted?
Anyone blaming Disney for the state of Lucasfilm franchises seems to have a huge chunk of selective memory for the 2000s. (E.g. for me, I stopped paying attention to a lot of new Star Wars media for a while after Vector Prime in 1999 and the resulting story arc.)
Your point that the franchise wasn't in a great spot at acquisition is noted, and I'd agree with it. I'm not the same commenter who originally voiced the broad anti-Disney polemic, I'm mostly just chiming in my general disappointment at this one franchise's lifespan in hindsight.
But, I'd say it's only gotten worse over Disney's ownership. It's not much of an achievement for any film to be better than Crystal Skull, and results seem to be indicating neither movie is a successful new installment for the franchise.
I was going to give Disney credit for Lego Indiana Jones as another positive moment for the franchise, but that game actually predates the acquisition!
On the note of squeezing blood from the stone that is Harrison Ford as the protagonist, James Bond has switched its eponymous leading act many times and remains a pretty strong franchise (and has endured quite a few clunker releases) - for some reason the various writers of Indiana Jones over the years decided to do the opposite with these films.
Neither the lego game nor Atlantis feature any voicing from Harrison Ford, but they still capture the "feeling" of the original trilogy of movies better than either of Disney's sequels, IMO. I think the decision for Indiana Jones 4 to be led by Ford again could be a good example of a franchise -steering decision by Disney that's really only been to its detriment.
The Lego games in general (across all the various properties) really seem to have been made by actual amateur fans (in the sense of amour) who love the material and respect it whilst poking fun.
I assume they had very little high level management oversight.
It wouldn't suprise me if Lucasfilm pre-Disney may have intended to use 4 to hand things off to Shia LeBeouf, but, well, whoops.
The Bond model is an interesting one, I wonder how well it would work for Indiana Jones. First I guess you gotta decide if you are gonna bring it forward in time or not. If you do, I think there's something of a bad guy problem. Raiders and Last Crusade both benefited a lot from the Nazis being on the other side of things. Keeping that scale + keeping the focus on archeological finds vs whatever Bond McGuffin can be imagined seems a hard job to me... And if you leave it set in the WWII era... there's only so much you can plow that land too.
And once you're 30 years after major media relevance, recasting your hero is a highly risky move. Does Indiana Jones without Harrison Ford have more pull? Or even less? (Compare to, say, Uncharted, which opened to less money than Dial of Destiny, but was cheaper to make at least).
(Of course, "highly risky move" also has to include spending $300M to make a new entry after that long... so... whoops again)
Casino royale was a remake of an older bond movie with the same name, using a rather well known actor at the time. Could've been a nostalgia cash grab but ended up being so great he's still the only James bond some people have known.
That was a risk taken and it pulled off greatly. Can we ever imagine seeing billion dollar studios taking similar risks?
It was originally designed to emulate serials which had no end of (literal) cliffhanger stories. Temple of Doom didn’t rely on Nazi’s and is not told in sequential order with the other movies.
The Indiana Jones franchise exists because of the Indiana Jones character. People that go to one of those movies want to see him.
If you setup a Mary Sue that treats him like an useless geriatric waste of a man, and finish the movie by having this Mary Sue knock him out, you're basically pissing in your own franchise. And since Harrison Ford won't be able to do another one, this is how the franchise ended, with a sour note.
And yet the audience reaction to that has been largely positive - both in aggregate and in the theater I was in - it's the critics that have been more sour compared to how they reacted to Crystal Skull (while the audience disliked that one much more).
If you wanna say "don't make a movie about an old version of that character," fine. But give it a fucking break with the idea that the filmmakers are attacking you by showing that an 80 year old version of the character wouldn't be the same as a 40 year old version.
Let's remember that the last successful film in the franchise made EXCELLENT use of aging and the effect of that on the character's relationships with a great premise and execution by Ford and Connery, too. We were already getting to peek beyond just "here's Indy again doing Indy things"
“Audiences,” seem to have a very positive reception to every Disney movie no matter how bad it is or the average person thinks it is. This isn’t proof of anything other than Disney has very effective marketing
> And since Harrison Ford won't be able to do another one
I don't know, maybe ask Holo-Reagan or Holo-Tupac what he thinks about that? Or we've got holo-leia or holo-tarkin even within the star wars universe already.
You just have to face it, death isn't the obstacle it used to be. There's lots of dead actors out there living kickass lives.
I absolutely abhor using a dead person's image or material for new material. I don't want to hear an AI Beethoven or read an AI Hemingway.
Actors are the same. Those are not the real artists, just what some corporate shill thought those actors would do. If you enjoy that, understand that it's not different at all from watching an animated movie.
I think the visual effects made a huge difference. The practical effects were good enough to be impressive and believable. But also some placed limits on the craziness of the story. Modern VFX has just destroyed that balance.
How could this be unclear? They are both narratives. They both have characters. Why wouldn't a concept about characters from one map to the other? Do you think fanfic characters and official movie characters are incompatible types? I have never read or written a fan fic and encountered this term countless times in discussion of media.
I'm honestly baffled how you can't imagine a movie with a character embodying the qualities described in the tvtropes entry.
I'm going by the description in the source you provided me, which provides a detailed and specific meaning in the context of fanfic and then says the term is also used as a general pejorative. If I'm not meant to use the description in that source I'm not sure why you linked to it.
Well, Harrison Ford is literally 80 years old. I think Indiana Jones is about 80 in the latest movie as well. Complaining that a *gasp* woman could beat up an octogenarian is more of a commentary about you than the inevitable march of time.
No. It's specifically the "Mary Sue" part that he's annoyed by. That term is never used online to refer to male character.
Of course, a dude that can not only be athletic, can read every inscription in every ancient language, is an expert in every ancient civilization, and use a bull whip as a grappling hook at will gets a pass.
No, then they're called a Gary Stu, Marty Stu, Marty Sam or Tom Sue and they exist too. They too are annoying and numerous, but less common.
Harry Potter, Scott Pilgrim, James Bond, any character Vin Diesel plays, etc.
Mary Sues are called out rightly because they're a shitty trope used by lazy writers. Nobody (with any intelligence or credibility) ever said that George Lucas was a particularly great writer. It's popcorn entertainment for a mass market.
Indiana Jones movies came out in a time where movie studios thought audiences were fucking morons and we have much higher standards today after being fed decades of high-concept movies and television. Hence the flat reception and pushback. Even Crystal Skull had its asshole ripped open by audiences without needing misogyny to be a diversion/excuse to explain the turd released by the studio.
Movies can't cash in by gender/age/race-swapping classic franchises because if you released those movies as they were today they would ALSO bomb. But Hollywood is certainly trying and trying and scratching its head wondering why it isn't working.
I can't agree with the second half of your post. Indiana Jones started reasonably strong with Raiders and has been on a steep descent ever since. The secondary characters in Temple of Doom were truly annoying and the franchise only got worse from there. I could be coaxed into watching the first again, but none of the sequels.
And the state of modern blockbusters shows that mass audiences haven't developed more sophisticated taste, they still gobble up slop like Marvel for a dozen+ sequels/spinoffs with thunderous enthusiasm until they eventually, finally, get bored of the premise and start looking for some new slop. MCU isn't failing because audiences got more sophisticated between five years ago and now; it's failing because they've been putting out the same movie with reskined costumes for 15 years now and that was never going to keep people interested forever. It still had one hell of a run though, proving that audiences today don't have more taste than audiences in the 80s.
Come back when any of those characters you listed are called Mary Sue.
Let’s use Star Wars for an example. A teenager with little education, grows up on a backwater desert planet immediately uses the Force and flies an advanced space craft into battle, becoming the focus of attention of a galaxy spanning fascist military, and a hero in an under resourced underground partisan movement.
You’re hard pressed to find anyone complaining about Luke Skywalker, but Rey? OMG, the knives were out after the trailer dropped.
To deny this dynamic after almost 10 years of it playing out very visibly online and off, at this point is willful ignorance at best.
> You’re hard pressed to find anyone complaining about Luke Skywalker, but Rey? OMG
That's because Luke took a long time to get good, including impulsively running off to fight and losing his arm, and was a whiny so and so, and was only good at certain things.
Rey is a classic MS because she's good at everything from the start; she wins every fight, including against the scariest Sith baddie around; flies spaceships perfectly despite having not done it before; fixes the Millennium Falcon in a way that Han Solo, its owner, didn't understand; was an expert boat navigator across a stormy sea that the locals wouldn't sail across, despite having grown up on a desert planet; everyone likes her (e.g. after Han dies Leia, who's met Rey once before, emotionally hugs Rey and not Chewie); she has random helpful encounters out of nowhere; etc etc.
I get some characters are unfairly characterised as [MG]ary S(ue|tu), or unfairly not as, but this doesn't seem one of those cases. You might say it's because Disney exec leadership and directing of episodes 7-9 were terrible and fragmented, and you'd be right, but the above still stands.
> You’re hard pressed to find anyone complaining about Luke Skywalker
That's just not true. The whole "chosen one" premise is extremely common in fantasy and scifi and widely criticized by people with sufficient taste and media literacy to become aware of the pattern and grow weary of it. Media that fits this pattern is considered adolescent; adults who are obsessed with Star Wars or Harry Potter are called manchildren. "Mary Sue" is gendered language that isn't used to describe male characters, but that doesn't mean this same exact sort of bad writing for male characters doesn't exist, or isn't recognized as such.
Off the top of my head: Harry Potter, Star Wars, the Matrix, virtually all shonen anime, The Wheel of Time, anything Branden Sanderson has written... all of these are considered adolescent (have I pissed off everybody yet?) It's extremely hard to think of any example of "chosen one" media that isn't considered adolescent... Dune maybe? This trope is so common, it taints the reputation of all fantasy and sci-fi by association.
So one of the main features of a Mary/Marty Sue is that everyone seems to really like them and be invested in them immediately. Rey has that (Finn latches on to her quickly, Han starts treating her as a surrogate child very quickly, Leia hugs her instead of Chewie, even the antagonist Kylo seems to have an interest in her, etc.) but Luke doesn't have that.
Leia seems to think he's a bit useless at times during the escape, Han thinks he's a backwater rube, but these characters grow close over the course of the story.
I admit that a lot of people do leave off the "is treated as super important and great by everyone immediately" bit when they define a Sue a lot, but I think it is a significant part of the definition and I also think it is a big part of what people don't like even if they often fail to articulate it. There's a "look at how cool and perfect our character is!" feeling you get when sequels introduce new characters into an existing setting and all the old characters fawn over them immediately that just isn't fun to watch.
Lastly characterizing Luke as "immediately using the Force" is bullshit I am sick of seeing. Firstly, we do see him practicing and failing at it on the trip to the Death Star, secondly he only uses it in incredibly vague terms to blow up the Death Star in a way that is way closer to "having faith" than "using a super power" in the context of the story. Luke sees Obi-Wan do a mind trick in the first half of New Hope and we don't see Luke even attempt it until Return of the Jedi. The first time we see Luke use a force ability outside of the Death Star run, which again in terms of how it is presented isn't really the same as other times the force is used, is to move his light sabre on Hoth. This is months after New Hope and he still really struggles to do it. But even if I cede the blowing up of the Death Star as Luke using the force instead of trusting in the force, we still see him actually practice trying to still his mind and use it before it happens, which isn't something we get for Rey.
Don't forget Wesley Crusher. I don't know why people pretend that the male version isn't also disliked, but I don't think it's a rational stance. People don't like either.
Other characters on the show find Wesley obnoxious, and he nearly washes out of Starfleet Academy after covering up a stunt that killed one of his friends. I don't see him as a wish-fulfillment character at all.
He is for a long time. Everyone likes him; he's an extremely high achiever; he easily impresses a beautiful girl, and in the same episode outwits all of the Enterprise's security staff to save the Enterprise; he even has special powers that somehow make him a more advanced iteration of the human species.
I'm not sure if the OP meant it, but there's a decided different in my mind between "murdering" a series and "ruining" it. A bad new entry doesn't make the old ones worse, but it may effectively foreclose any chance of making another better one later.
For people who maybe were hoping for another good Indiana Jones movie in the same vein as the first few, having these last two be received terribly means we're unlikely to see another attempt for years, if ever.
I think the closest I’ve ever seen to ‘murdering’ a series by releasing new media was the final series of game of thrones retroactively killed the cultural phenomenon that it was.
> the final series of game of thrones retroactively killed the cultural phenomenon that it was
I agree with you on the observation. Subjectively I feel the same. I wonder if someone has hard data on this. I wonder if there is some executive somewhere looking at a graph of polling results, or merchandise sales or anything like that and feeling terrible that they have screwed up (at least privately, even if they would never admit publicly).
I believe that the latest few seasons removed from my enjoyment of the whole franchise. It even made the earlier episodes worse, in the same way a flat punch line ruins even the most masterfull lead up of a joke. But does this feeling also appear on the bean counting level? Fundamentally a franchise is a business enterprise with the goal of making money for the owners. Does “ruining” a series this way also effects the bottom line in a way which can be expressed in the accounting?
That's actually a good example - The early seasons aren't necessarily worse because of the end of the show, but it definitely killed a few spinoff shows HBO was planning, and also killed the Star Wars movie that the showrunners were working on.
Obviously we're still getting House of the Dragon, but if you'd told me before the last season came out that we'd only have 1 spinoff GoT show now, and that it wasn't that big of a deal, I'm not sure I'd have believed you.
The new material has franchise/brand association, and the privileged production (eg. as opposed to fan cannon) cements it. They're now cognitively inseparable. The mental space the OT and PT occupied now has Disney's hands all over it .
Once especially cherished, Star Wars is a completely ruined universe in my mind. The mystery of the larger universe has been filled in with things I don't like, and there's no more magic left. I can't imagine anything that can salvage it. I don't care to see any more, probably ever.
I'd rather support independent films and small creators anyway.
I'm with you. I think most of the star wars movies are pretty bad, but some of them are pretty good. And the bad ones don't make me feel worse about the good ones.
I think there has been a serious cultural shift in this regard sometime during the 00s. Most people used to understand that sequels are generally shitty and didn't make a big deal of this. S-tier classics from the likes of Disney used to get shitty straight-to-DVD sequels (e.g. Lion King 2) and nobody even thought to whine about it. Even movies that had very well received sequels would sometimes receive further sequels that were stinkers, and nobody started ranting about how the original was ruined because of it.
Alien and Aliens were great, then you got Alien 3, AvP, etc.. a bunch of mediocre slop to put it nicely (actually I like 3, but I admit it's deeply flawed). But when did you ever hear somebody say that AvP or Alien Resurrection ruined how they felt about Alien or Aliens? Terminator and T2; great movies that got a bunch of shitty spinoffs and sequels, but nobody said at the time that their enjoyment of the first two was ruined by what followed. James Bond has been a rollercoaster of quality for decades but it keeps going and fans enjoy calm respectful debates about which are their favorites. The Godzilla franchise has lots of quality interspersed with lots of crap, I don't hear many people saying that the horrible Minilla retroactively ruined King Kong vs. Godzilla, or for that matter, that King Kong vs. Godzilla ruined Godzilla (1954). The first Jurassic Park wasn't said to be ruined by the cashgrab sequels. The Land Before Time is still warmly remembered, despite 13(!) direct-to-dvd sequels.
Even in the early 2000s, I heard a lot of people saying they didn't like the Star Wars prequels, but I didn't hear many people saying the first three movies were ruined. Not until a few years later did this attitude start to find traction.
I'm not the biggest fan of the reboot either, but I suspect that my generation is no longer the intended target audience.
The young professionals at my workplace seems to be really enjoying it, and have praised its action sequences, diverse and inclusive casts, and themes that are relevant to them.
