2022 was a year of squandered IP—will 2023 be any better?
Film franchises mostly disappointed last year, but studios will try again this year with new installments from the MCU, John Wick, Transformers, and more
Film Features Brie Larson
Looking back at the films of 2022, one recurring trend seemed to cycle through over and over: the excitement for a new project in a series we loved, followed by mounting trepidation as bad reviews rolled in, and finally the first-hand disappointment of actually seeing that subpar film. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
Investing in a franchise used to be a safe bet in Hollywood. From a financial standpoint, it makes sense; audiences are generally more likely to turn out for a title they recognize than something completely new. In an era with escalating budgets and a splintering marketplace, including stiff competition between physical theaters and ubiquitous streaming platforms, attracting fans with something familiar should be a no-brainer.
And maybe that’s the problem. Last year we saw plenty of projects taking advantage of established intellectual property as their selling point, but it felt like there wasn’t much thought put into those films and shows, beyond getting the band back together. Sure, there were a handful of successes, including Tom Cruise’s triumphant return to the cockpit in Top Gun: Maverick. But for every Maverick, there were multiple critical and financial flops that felt like wasted opportunities.
Now, as 2023 begins to heat up, we decided to revisit how the big franchise installments from the past 12 months performed, and to look ahead at the big IP releases that are teed up for the year ahead.
The quality gap
Gone are the days when a studio or a network can be assured success with nothing more than a recognizable title on the poster. Now the business of show is more complicated. The impact of instantaneous word of mouth through social media has only intensified in the post-pandemic era. And just as film production has changed dramatically, so has the experience of going to see films in theaters.
But the make-or-break factor is what it’s always been: quality. If a film isn’t actually good it won’t stick around long. An underperforming sequel may slash enthusiasm for future installments. Last year’s Jurassic World: Dominion, for instance, reunited the original cast of Jurassic Park, only to waste them on a poorly constructed retread of tired ideas. The film wasn’t just bad, it may prove to be a franchise killer, with both critics and fans wondering if it might finally be time to call for the extinction of this long-in-the-tooth dinosaur series.
Compare that to Maverick, which didn’t break any molds but had a tight, easy-to-follow plot, lots of spectacular aerial acrobatics, and a cast of fresh faces ready to accept the torch passed on by Cruise. Other winners from 2022 followed a similar formula: Prey, The Batman, and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever all earned the kind of acclaim from fans and praise from critics that is bound to keep those respective franchises healthy for some time.
Tarnishing a legacy
There were far more misses than hits last year. If you’ve forgotten that Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets Of Dumbledore came out in 2022, we wouldn’t blame you. Following the lukewarm reception fans gave the previous film, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes Of Grindelwald, there was a lot riding on Secrets Of Dumbledore to keep the Harry Potter prequel series going. Yet it didn’t even reach $100 million in domestic box office receipts, dropping a steep 67% from its first week of release to its second last April. The fate of the previously announced fourth and fifth films in the series is now uncertain.
And then there’s Marvel and its once mighty MCU, which is finally showing signs of vulnerability. Two of last year’s phase four films—Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness and Thor: Love And Thunder—fell below expectations, both critically and financially. And let’s not forget Sony’s infamous flop Morbius; meme-ification doesn’t always translate into box-office success.
Other letdowns included Lightyear, which failed to capture the magic of its Toy Story inspiration and fell flat with audiences. Disney also missed the mark with two direct-to-streaming sequels of beloved films that relied more on nostalgia for the originals than original storytelling—Hocus Pocus 2 and Disenchanted.
Horror fans weren’t spared disappointment in 2022 either, with legacy sequels like Halloween Ends, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Jeepers Creepers: Reborn failing to measure up to the expectations of franchise fans. Truth be told, we’d be fine taking a break from all of these characters and worlds for a while.
Can franchise films make a comeback in 2023?
Despite the diminishing returns, Hollywood studios continue to defer to accountants over creatives as they churn out sequels with no sign of slowing. Whether this approach is sustainable in the long run doesn’t seem to matter. These conglomerates live from financial quarter to financial quarter, and are historically slow to adjust to an ever-changing market.
Which franchise titles figure to break out this year? We can make some educated guesses. In the potential win column, based on preview trailers and the level of talent involved, hopes are high for Magic Mike’s Last Dance, John Wick: Chapter 4, and Creed III. One of last year’s few successful sequels, Scream, which invigorated Kevin Williams’ meta slasher series for a new generation, gets a 2023 followup with Scream 6, and there’s no reason to think it won’t be just as popular. There’s also a new Fast And Furious film, Fast X, on the way with new cast members Brie Larson, Jason Momoa, and Alan Ritchson joining the family.
Marvel has some big ensemble projects of its own planned this year, and may have more success with the fifth phase of the MCU than it did with the fourth. Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania will be essential viewing for the next phase, introducing the MCU’s newest big bad, Kang The Conqueror (Johnathan Majors)—not the same guy as the variant we met in Loki, in case you were wondering—and uniting elements of the multiverse that will be carried through in future films. Upcoming crossover team-ups like The Marvels and Thunderbolts should inject some much-needed energy into the superhero mega-franchise. We’re also feeling good about James Gunn’s big Marvel swan song Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3, which he made before taking over at rival studio DC. The performance of these films may tell us whether 2022’s downturn was an anomaly or a sign of broader superhero fatigue.
Riskier bets
There are a number of upcoming films that currently exist on the cusp between “could be awesome” and “could go horribly wrong.” Expendables 4 will yet again unite a group of action stars—including Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Dolph Lundgren, and Randy Couture—but director Scott Waugh doesn’t exactly have a filmography to match his cast. New cast members Megan Fox, 50 Cent, Andy Garcia, and Tony Jaa may add some value, though.
There’s also another Transformers film on the way, Transformers: Rise Of The Beasts. The previous film in the franchise was 2018’s Bumblebee, a reboot that was widely considered a hit. This will be a follow-up to that film, under the direction of Steven Caple, Jr., whose previous work includes Creed II and The Land. We’ll see if this one continues to revitalize the robots-in-disguise series or dismantles it for the time being.
After Maverick, it’s hard to bet against Tom Cruise, but the upcoming Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One will be the seventh in the series. Crazy stunts aside, there’s not as much novelty to seeing him play Ethan Hunt yet again as there was in catching up with Captain Pete Mitchell after 36 years.
And then there’s the Indiana Jones film seemingly no one asked for, Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny. Will it be as poorly received as Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull? Hard to tell at this point, but director James Mangold is a great choice to give an aging Indy the proper sendoff he deserves, as he did with Wolverine in Logan (future Deadpool appearances notwithstanding). We have to say we’re intrigued by the supporting cast, including Phoebe Waller-Bridge, John Rhys-Davies, Mads Mikkelsen, Toby Jones, and Boyd Holbrook.
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If a film isn’t actually good it won’t stick around long. An underperforming sequel may slash enthusiasm for future installments. Last year’s Jurassic World: Dominion, for instance, reunited the original cast of Jurassic Park, only to waste them on a poorly constructed retread of tired ideas. The film wasn’t just bad, it may prove to be a franchise killer, with both critics and fans wondering if it might finally be time to call for the extinction of this long-in-the-tooth dinosaur series.The film was massively commercially successful (over a billion at the box office). And the previous Jurassic World movies were also successful enough to get sequels despite not actually being good!
And let’s not forget Sony’s infamous flop Morbius; meme-ification doesn’t always translate into box-office success.
It wasn’t really a sequel, even if it attempted to tie into other superhero films Sony could legally reference.
An odd attempt at a tie-in that had a fun result that I just learned about: Jurassic Park and Transformers.Back in the early 90s, when Jurassic Park was a hit and Transformers was kind of sleeping, some company execs wanted to do toy tie-ins for both Jurassic Park and the Transformers.That fizzled out, but some of the work had already been done, so it was reconfigured over on the Hasbro end and Beast Wars was the result!
And Beast Wars was called Beasties for those of us in Canada because the broadcaster, YTV, considered the original title too violent. Like how it was Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles in the UK.
And how War Planets became Shadow Raiders in Canada.
So, when Optimus Primal declared the Beast Wars to be over, in Canada did he say that the Beasties was over? 🤣
I think they airbrushed out the nunchucks, too, for the UK.
This could’ve been you lot:
Jurassic World: Dominion has to be the most disappointing $1 billion ever. It finally dragged itself across that line — 4 months after release — only because Universal refused to pull it from theaters.For comparison: Both the original Jurassic World and Fallen Kingdom needed only about two weeks to hit that figure.
The budget appears to have been less than 200 million, so it’s still a very profitable movie.
How about they fix the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland before putting out another movie? I know I’m dating myself here but that ride hasn’t worked for shit since the 90’s, and fixing it would be a good promotion.
You’re in luck. It just closed a few days ago for a lengthy refurbishment with a targeted re-opening of “Spring 2023”.
That’s a really short refurbisment not a lengthy one
Spring 2023 could mean April or May. A big Disneyland attraction being down for four or five months is a pretty big deal..
Most likely updates for Dial of Destiny..
I really hope they do something with the projection of the rats falling out of a tree or whatever the hell it is. I bet if you turned on the lights down there, you’d see the door to a break room or something..
Doc Strange 2 wound up at $950 million, ninth biggest opening weekend of all time, around $300 million improvement on Doc 1, all without a release in China, which would’ve pushed it into billion dollar territory. Quality gap aside, there’s no possible way to read that as a case of diminishing returns.
Compared to Wakanda Forever, which has made about $850 million, a lot less than its predecessor, being positioned here as a “winner”.
I think the author is speaking “creatively,” not financially. A fact I’d argue with since I quite enjoyed Strange 2. Sure, narratively it’s a mess and how it treats Wanda’s development is reductive but they let Sam Raimi make a Sam Raimi movie in the MCU and I’m never not gonna be on board with that. Wakanda I can’t comment on since I haven’t seen it. And comparing the BO for WF to the first BP was never gonna be fair. The first one hit at a culturally opportune time. Then factor in the loss of Boseman and the state of movies throughout the pandemic and it was always gonna “underperform” compared to the first.
Wakanda Forever also had to deal with certain groups on social media pushing that the film was part of ‘the feminist agenda’ and was ‘anti-men’ in the weeks leading up to its release.
Those people don’t actually affect a film’s finances.
Like that really influences a Marvel movie’s success. Ms Marvel made a billion
So? It’s an extrememly vocal but small minority, and they say the same thing about literally every major film released not just bp. We can’t conclusively say if that is a factor in its financial performance or not.
I had way more fun watching Dr Strange 2 than I did Wakanda Forever. There was a zany creativity to the former that I really enjoyed. I did like huge amounts of Wakanda Forever but it took ages to get underway and (in my opinion) relied too heavily on a weak lead. But also, excellent point about the pandemic. Are we just going to pretend that has not been a factor, both at the production side and the box office? Because really that the industry has survived the way it has is all-around impressive.
It had a smaller window to make money among other things. Black Panther was an event. Wakanda Forever was the return of a fan favorite franchise. It’s two different things. We can also stop acting like that close to a billion is some kind of failure.
Financially, it did well, sure. Creatively, Strange was a disappointment, with all the potential of a multiverse wasted by showing us a couple of dull worlds that seem like reskinned variants of the main MCU, the potential of introducing Mr. Fantastic and Professor X wasted by killing them off instantly (and having them played by actors who will certainly be recast for the main universe) and the potential of a followup to Wandavision wasted by turning Wanda into a generic bad guy who seems to have forgotten her husband existed. No movie better encapsulated the problem with franchise movies in 2022 than Dr. Strange 2 did.
“the potential of introducing Mr. Fantastic and Professor X wasted by killing them off instantly (and having them played by actors who will certainly be recast for the main universe)”That was the joke
The joke only works if the movie has something to offer beside cameos, and this one sure didn’t.
Noone’s forcing you to like the film, but clearly others are getting more out of it than you did.
“clearly others are getting more out of it than you did.”And they are allowed to do that, just like I’m allowed not to like it. I don’t see the issue here.
“I didn’t like it” and “it had nothing to offer” are two different statements, I was pushing back on the latter.
Personally I really liked most of Dr. Strange. I do agree the whole “lets introduce all these long awaited characters to easily kill them off” was a waste however. But at $950 million I agree it does not belong on this list, as the author does call out “financially”.
Those aren’t inherently problems they’re just the things you happened to not like
Well said!
I saw Everything Everywhere All at Once the day after Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. EEAAO comprehensively beat DS2:MoM’s ass six ways from Sunday in every single facet in the creative process. The difference really was night and day with EEAAO being a bright day (and a huge gale of fresh air) while MoM was a dark and the most bleak of nights.Even more impressively, EEAAO cost a tenth as much or less than MoM and unlike the latter is hoovering up the award nominations. However, like you said, it also grossed over 9 times as much, so until it starts to really hurt the makers financially, nothing fundamental will change.
“Even more impressively, EEAAO cost a tenth as much or less than MoM and unlike the latter is hoovering up the award nominations”I mean its a little unfair ,part of EEAAO’s charm is that its a bit rough around the edges , so hot dog fingers , early 00 bluetooth headsets repurposed as dimensional travel devices , and googly eyed rocks work perfectly for it . Multiverse wouldnt have been able to get away with that(I mean I’d love to see a ‘sweded’ Marvel multiverse movie done with household objects remade into special effects , but I dont think most viewers would.
Love and Thunder and Multiverse of Madness were good though. People kicked off because they shifted to a pulpier tone and/or had women in them, but that’s not the same as a decline in quality.
I didn’t care for Multiverse turning Wanda into a villain, but for all the complaints of “Marvel’s house style constrains directors!” whining, Sam Raimi’s fingerprints were all over that film. If anything, it was the need for a PG-13 rating that was limiting. If Raimi had been left to o his own devices, I’m certain we would have seen Capt. Carter graphically cut in half, and not the implied bisection we were given.
He really stretched the limits of that rating alright. And between the trippy possession scene and the puppet-looking demons, it was like he’d smuggled an Evil Dead film into the MCU.
In the director’s cut Scarlet Witch actually missed and Carter is just suffering from one of her bouts of narcolepsy
For a PG-13 movie Dr Strange possessing his own alternate dimensional corpse while cloaked in a hundred specters was pretty graphic. I think they really rode the line as hard as they could, and i really liked the whole movie.
I think Multiverse’s biggest problem was that it had a woman in it who was portrayed as a hysterical mommy-monster incapable of sound judgement because she missed her babies, which was a really simplistic, frustrating portrayal given how much depth she’d been given in Wandavision.
Love and Thunder was underrated, though. I still haven’t figured out why people disliked that one other than “it wasn’t Ragnarok.” If anything, the fact that it didn’t turn *everything* into a joke the way Ragnarok did will probably make L&T more enjoyable on repeat viewing.
See, I get how Wanda’s villain turn would feel super-contrived if you *hadn’t* seen Wandavision, but I thought the show set it up pretty solidly. Don’t you remember the discourse around how she treated the townspeople and never faced any real accountability for it?Saying that, I’d also seen What If and Agents of SHIELD, which both did a lot to set it up too (The Dr Strange episode of What If paralleled Wanda’s arc pretty hard, and AOS had a whole Darkhold arc). I’ll agree the film could have definitely used more build-up to the reveal, even knowing it was coming. A coupla scenes with more dialogue to let the characters breathe a bit.I think what elevated Love and Thunder over Ragnarok slightly for me was that Ragnarok had dome dramatic moments get undercut by jokes, whereas L&T jumped from lighter moments to darker ones; the latter making for more effective juxtaposition.
oh you are so right about Wanda vision. After all it’s unreliable narrator on steroids!
I think a big part of the feelings on Love and Thunder that affect how people view it is that the first act is a mess. The jokes, by and large, don’t land and they have to waste a bunch of time writing the Guardians of the Galaxy out of the movie purely because a previous movie showed Thor sailing off into the space with them.Once all that stuff was taken care of and it got into the actual story, it got WAY better (the black and white world, Bale, Thor’s “growing up” arc) but the damage was done. Those first 30 minutes were ROUGH.
If anything, the fact that it didn’t turn *everything* into a joke the
way Ragnarok did will probably make L&T more enjoyable on repeat
viewingNow see, I personally felt like Love & Thunder DID turn everything into a joke. Moreso than Ragnarok, IMO. Particularly considering the original source material: “Lets take the Mighty Thor storyline where Jane balances being a hero and fighting cancer, where doing one accelerates the other, and ALSO lets take this very long, brooding, God Killer epic, which is all about calling out deities for failing their worshipers and makes Thor question his very existence, and mash them up into a single slapstick comedy”.I don’t have an issue with anyone enjoying it. I just think it is interesting how different people can consume the same content and have VERY different takes.
I enjoyed it, but I agree the tonal shifts were incredibly jarring, some moments of levity immediately followed by some heavy subject matter.
Yeah, the drama/comedy whiplash was *way* worse in Love and Thunder. “Thor, I have cancer…BUT GET A LOAD OF THOSE HILARIOUS SCREAMING GOATS, AMIRIGHT?”
The trick of Ragnarok is that it presents a dark story that could have been played straight, but adds a lot of jokes. L&T tries the same trick, but there’s just too much darkness to the story. Stage 4 cancer, kids dying in the desert, kids being kidnapped, gods being slaughtered. When there’s a silly joke or music cue every 30 seconds or so, it’s impossible to take any of the material seriously.
Yeah, I felt on a 1-10 scale, 1 being pure comedy and 10 being pure drama (or “dark” source material), Ragnarok bounced between 3 and 7, where L&T was moments of either 1-2 or 9-10, with nothing in the middle. Ragnarok did a much better job of sliding around that middle scale vs. CANCER … LOLGOATS … DEAD KIDS … LOLNAKEDTHOR.
See, I thought Ragnarok’s story was equally dark given that it’s about how everything Thor ever loved was built on colonialism and the slaughter of countless innocent beings, to the point that he decides his own homeland doesn’t deserve to survive.I feel you could go back and forth on which movie is darker but for my money L&T did a better job on balancing the tone because it resisted the urge to cap off every scene with a gag. But this is definitely a matter of personal taste.
The God Butcher storyline alone may have not been exactly the right fit for Taika. Or maybe if it was only the God Butcher, we would have gotten more of that balance that he showed in Jojo Rabbit. I remember reading that storyline and thinking there would be no way it could be made into a movie without religous protesters. Also on a side note, the people upset when they introduced Jane as Thor were clearly not reading that book. The entire run was hitting religon, climate change, environmentalism, Thor losing his arm, Thor losing his hammer. You don’t enjoyably read all of that, but then hit Mighty Thor and go, “this is too far!”
The arguments against L&T I always hear are things like ‘its all about jokes’ and ‘they made Thor a himbo’ and ‘it was just shallow and cartoony’ and i’m like my brothers and sisters of the church of Stan Lee… have you not been paying attention to thor in the last eight years?Personally i think it was actually pretty deep when you look back at it, sure it was a little .. bombastic, but thats very on-brand for the comic too. If anything, when you look back at the early thor he was much more shallow and much more boring and also much more of a problematic idiot. But now that he’s making jokes and is put in silly situations sometimes like having a jealous axe floating around with him suddenly people are like ‘this comic book movie about a viking space-god fighting shadow monsters is just too silly for me!’ Yeah he gets stripped naked in a scene and the girls swoon, yes Zeus is silly and pompus.. but if the whole movie is grimdark you get The Dark World and NO ONE likes that…
Also the goats were funny every time they were on screen and i’ll never surrender this position.
I’ll never understand some people.
This. It was like they took all the emotional depth that was so clenching in WandaVision and turned it into a smoothie of simplistic villainy and boring character blunting.
Was it, though? Everything Everywhere All at Once is the vastly superior multiverse film to Multiverse of Madness (with effectively way more multiverses *and* madness just for starters) and well, film in general. The difference is stark.
The whole “the movie failed cause women aren’t allowed” is a really hard reach for a franchise where Ms Marvel made a billion. Both of them were forgettable at best.
Then it’s a good thing that’s not what I said; I said that pushback against the movies should be taken with a pinch of salt given the loudest voices were just complaining that they were too “woke” and not dour enough.
Ah ok, I totally misread then, apologies
nw, it happens 🙂
“And/or had women in them”Can you prove this though? I feel like you’re giving a very small group of vocal chuds a lot more credit than they deserve.
How could “people kicked off” not refer to the vocal element? Minority or not, the outspoken voices are the ones shaping the discourse, and pretending the angry neckbeards aren’t contributing to the negativity is naive at best.
So, 2022 was a year of disappointing films based on existing IP, except for Top Gun, The Batman, Prey, Wakanda Forever and Scream (plus an entirely overlooked Avatar). Oh, and a couple of MCU films that made only a fuckton of money instead of a mega-fuckton. (BTW, Doctor Strange 2 nearly doubled the domestic gross of the original, so…)
Yeah. After a few years of studios feeling like it didn’t make sense to make any movies that weren’t franchises. So this is a thing.
You are missing the point. The article undermines its own premise. It claims that 2022 was a year of “squandered IP,” yet it rattles off a batch of films that were both critical and financial successes. It inexplicably fails to mention the biggest film currently in release.* And one of its alleged failures, Doctor Strange, was the third-biggest domestic release in 2022 and has a 74% RT score.It would be more accurate to say that 2022 was a year in which there were a lot of movies based on existing IP; some were huge successes and some weren’t, and even some of the latter were among the top ten domestic releases. Oh, and there was a Jeepers Creepers sequel.*It also overlooks the latest Minions installment, which was itself well-received by critics and was #6 domestically.
Are we forgetting about 2019, when there were two completely unrelated Critters reboots that both sucked royal ass?
I didn’t know there was a second ass-sucking Critters reboot from 2019
Crystal Skull was #3 for the year at the box office, behind The Dark Knight and Iron Man, and #2 worldwide. Say what you want about the quality, it was a hit.
And there was a fun little series of standalone Fantastic Beasts films in the idea of Newt investigating or rescuing a different cute animal each time out, but no, we have to make it an epic saga telling the exact same basic story from the Potter films, just decades earlier.
I watched Crimes of Grindlewald while high, despite JK Rowling being a bigot, Johnny Depp, etc…it was SO COMPLICATED. I hated the first film, and Redmayne and Waterston are possibly the least charismatic couple I have ever seen, but I liked Dan Fogler and Alison Sudol. The movie was just terrible.Love and Thunder was a total fucking mess…I can’t believe they put it in theaters, but Multiverse of Madness was the first recognizable Sam Raimi movie in a long time, when the reanimated corpse with all the squeaky demons came into play I had a smile a mile wide. All of the Jurassic Worlds were boring. Chris Pratt always seems like he’s an australian speaking in an american accent these days, his acting is so flat. Prey was awesome.I guess what listing this out has taught me is that I was a sucker and watched a LOT of this kind of IP last year even though much of it was meh.
also: weird that they gave almost the same character name to Carmen Ejogo‘s character in Fantastic Beasts that the main witch has in His Dark Materials.
also: weird that they gave almost the same character name to Carmen Ejogo‘s character in Fantastic Beasts that the main witch has in His Dark Materials.I just looked that up and yeah, that’s definitely a weird coincidence. Others have pointed out that Rowling tends to be rather impulsive in her naming conventions and seems to name characters according to what ‘feels right’ to her (which is not necessarily a bad way to do it) so I would imagine this is an example of cryptomnesia/subconscious plagiarism on her part (not that that means Pullman should sue or anything though).Meanwhile, HDM: the series. Watched the first episode when it first aired, felt deflated, couldn’t bring myself to watch the rest until recently. In the end, I thought it was a massively flawed adaptation, but still pretty decent and lovingly made. Many parts of S3/The Amber Spyglass that got me in the feels, including one show-only moment (the monkey), and they actually improved on certain parts of that book (see also: the monkey) even if other parts suffered. Overall, the series can’t hold a candle to the books, but I’m pretty glad I gave it a chance in the end.
Love and Thunder felt like someone went in on a second pass and cut/reshot it into a different movie than originally intended. The overall lack of Gorr when the storyboards and interviews indicated he’d be in a lot of the film really make it seem like it got a pretty big edit. I mean, there was even a lawsuit about Lena Heady’s role in the film but her part was cut entirely.
the part where Gorr was scaring kids in the…I don’t remember…ship or whatever, was just so amateurish. I really liked Ragnarok, they just took it way too far in the wrong direction…it feels like yeah there was a more plot-driven movie then they included the outtakes instead.
More than the “wrong direction” it felt like they just took it too far in *every* direction. Like I enjoy movies that mess with tone, but whiplashing from “this is a movie with silly screaming goats and Thor has a big dick jokes” to “this is a movie about processing cancer, loss, and the inevitability of death” was just too jarring for me.GotG 2 did a good job (I thought) of going from being silly to having an emotional payoff, but Love and Thunder just kind of fumbled it.
It felt like Taika just couldn’t bear to cut a single of his stars’/fuck buddies’ ad-libs, no matter how unfunny and pointless they were.
Was 2022 really an outlier? Or is it just that 90% of everything is still crap?
Starred for Sturgeon’s Law.
AV Club certainly hit that number.
Always has been , always will.
“Upcoming crossover team-ups like The Marvels and Thunderbolts should inject some much-needed energy into the superhero mega-franchise.”Um… have you seen Captain Marvel? I thought it was okay, but counting on the Carol Danvers character to more “energy” to the MCU than other entries have is nowhere near a safe bet, and Monica Rambeau didn’t exactly spark in WandaVision, either. So, either both those characters will have to become much more interesting in a hurry, or Kamala Khan will have to do a lot of heavy lifting.Also, I just noticed this piece doesn’t mention a single DCEU movie from last year or this one, which I admit is a pretty funny burn.
Another brave man bravely comes for Captain Marvel.
Ah yes the classic illogical accusation of sexism
Right. “Logic.”
Everything Marvel makes sucks and is for babies. You are a loser.
Damn, I’ve lost the respect of the incel community. What a heartbreaker.
You call people sexist because they don’t like a movie for babies. You are a fucking loser. You sit around wasting your life watching TV shows that come from video games. You are a loser.
That didn’t happen, you desperately lonely, angry dork.
It’s so heroic how you stand up for the Disney Company’s IP and call people sexist for not liking it you fucking loser.
Dude, you’re out here every day calling people racist for being black.Literally no fucking person alive gives one fuck about anything you have to say, you friendless incel cornball.
lol Whatever you need to tell yourself you fucking marvel fanboy loser. lol
Sorry your life is so fucking terrible kiddo.
lol Whatever you need to tell yourself loser.
Enjoy your miserable fucking life, son!
Illogical? IContainMultitudes is doing something with their life by calling people sexist for not liking a movie. No way are they a giant fucking loser.
Oh no! How can Hollywood possibly survive if it continues to squander its vast IP reserves at this rate?
I can’t believe this isn’t item #1 in this article. What a godawful waste of IP – not to mention special effects budget and a (decent) cast stuck with terrible scripts.
But enough about the Hobbit movies
Seems the article is just about movies, but I’d say (and I know I’m in a minority here) that House of the Draging was more of a waste of IP. It had the unconvincing leaps in story and character motivations that the final season of GoT had.
Rings of Poower had the look and sound of the original films, but sorely needed the humor of them.
Dragging? I had the absolute opposite feeling. HoTD moves at a lightning pace that did no credit to the source material OR the actors. The best part of the show was the early episodes because it was the longest time we spent with any of the actors and Milly Alcock did an absolutely fantastic job. As soon as the time skips started coming (and they just don’t stop coming) things became complicated.
Motivations because obscure and the reason behind some very big choices became shallow because while in the lore they had months and years to fester over situations, for us they went from one extreme to the other without explaining why people acted the way they did, and that ruined all the slow build opportunities.
All true.
I meant it felt like it dragged because I didn’t care about any of the characters really, for the reasons you mention, so it was a drag to watch.
I get that. I kept thinking i wanted there to be so many more episodes because i could never really understand why anyone did the things they did.
They were both disappointing, but at least RoP was somewhat entertaining in parts and fairly nice to look at. HotD is bar none the ugliest-looking piece of high-budget media I’ve ever seen, and all the characters are despicable monsters when they’re not just boring as shit.
Yeah, I really don’t see what so many others see in HotD. Well written, compelling drama, motivations that make sense if you know history… all things I’ve heard and all things I see more evidence against than for.
Dare I say, and I know this is subjective, but even the music is dull compared to GoT (and especially when compared to Rings of Power).
While HoT is not the best series of 2022 (Severance and Andor were much better for example) it was still fantastic and not even in the same league as the disastrous RoP. A disaster in writing, acting, direction, even the celebrated special effects were not that good.
Honestly what they did to the elves hairstyles was almost enough for me to be launched directly into the undying lands. I get that its a minor point, i get that its a stylistic choice, i get that its set thousands of years in the past… I get it, its all a stylistic choice.. but its IMPORTANT..When i had this;
And then you give me this;
Its gonna affect how i watch a show.Also we can agree that the highlight of the entire show was this;
Does the D&D movie not count as IP. I’m honestly looking forward to it because it looks stupid and is not taking itself at all seriously. Therefore capturing a real D&D session far more accurately then many self serious somber fantasy movies.
I have a cunning plan…..Find an IP that HASN’T been adapted for the big screen yet.Do three, maybe four movies in it – AT MOST.You want some sci-fi? How about James “The Stainless Steel Rat” diGriz? Fantasy? Fritz Leiber’s “Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser” stories are a completely different kind of fantasy.
I’d pay to see Lankhmar brought to life of the big screen.
Fred Sabherhagen’s Swords series is absolutely dying to get a streaming series treatment.
We need us a goddamn Retief adaptation.
I feel like Robert Asprin’s MythAdventures books could make a good adaptation (either live action or animated). I also kind of feel that way about Matt Wagner’s Mage, though maybe there’s less in there than I remember since I haven’t read it in like 20-30 years.
I’m really not a high culture snob, but boy framing discussions over whether or not art “squanders IP” is pretty depressing.
Par the course these days for The A.V. Club
I remember when AV Club used to write about movies, tv, and music rather than ‘IP’. But I do hope you find more enjoyable content this year, Cindy
For my money, Wakanda was just as bad as Thor 4 and Dr. Strange 2. Terrible year for MCU films.
sequelitis imo. need movies centered on new characters instead of expecting new characters to simply spin out from existing franchises. not a coincidence shang-chi was the best of the phase despite pretty much following the standard marvel formula(disclosure- haven’t seen WF yet and will just wait for D+ at this point).
In terms of IP, it’s pretty amazing to me that after 11 movies and three prior live action series (to say nothing of all the animated material,) we got the best piece of Star Wars content if not of all time then at least since 1980 with “Andor.”
when you’ve got your two biggest films of the year, returning IPs, as well as success stories like Prey and The Batman- i don’t quite get his headline fits
S2I’m with the author on this, though in my view, when an IP is ‘squandered’ it has nothing to do with money, and everything to do with how they used their concepts. Halloween Ends squandering their swan song for both Michael and Laurie is such a perfect example.With that in mind, I’m FAR less forgiving of the franchise offerings of 2022. Starting with a Rescue Rangers movie I’d been dreaming of, and then it doesn’t even use the damn team. What a waste. This is no different to me than Jurassic Dominion squandering the return of its original cast. Disney continued its trend of missing the point, and squandered their own Pinocchio adaption by making a movie where the kid isn’t learning any lessons! Then there’s the squandering of your IP’s very potential. Black Adam commits this in a couple of ways; One in trying to meaninglessly involve Superman, and the other in bafflingly not ever involving Shazam! Even under your ‘successes’, I’d argue Wakanda Forever squanders what a Black Panther franchise could have been, if they’d simply recast the role. That one is complicated so I can go easy on it a little, but even with what they offered, they squandered the progress Wakanda made as a nation, for a hard status quo reset. What was the point of the first movie now? It also squanders Riri Williams the same way Doctor Strange 2 squanders several characters, key among them, America Chavez.For as much as superheroes dominate the market, with the exception of The Batman, I thought this was the genre’s worst year creatively. And even then, The Batman isn’t all that creative. Riddle me this: When can something at the same time feel both new and… not? Let’s be real. We were watching a re-skinned Se7en. But the worst offender by far was Thor 4, which squaders some decent, weighty themes under mounds of bad comedy. How can Hollywood recycle so much yet still come up with all this waste??
“If a film isn’t actually good it won’t stick around long.”Bull. Total nonsense. Genuinely bad films make bank all the time. Take the first Jurassic World: big, misogynistic, and dumb, no redeeming qualities, made stupid amounts of money. I just got around to seeing the three John Wick films and both sequels made far more money than the first despite being far less good. Or even goddamn Avatar, which were all supposed to pretend is good now becuase the sequel was successful. It made more money than anything was in theatres for ever, stuck around. And it’s a cheesy, racist white saviour movie with bad pacing and magic space aboriginals who don’t have a single unique defining cultural trait Bad movies often stick around far longer than good ones and make tonnes of money doing it.
It’s funny, I thought Halloween Ends was the best by far of the new trilogy until the last 15 minutes when it just turns into a Michael Meyers fight again.
I feel like a lot of the 2022 movies based on existing IP just were not very good. I am not sure if that is systemic (i.e. all sequels are subject to diminishing returns) or if they just were not that good. I loved the Illuminati and horror elements of DS2, but that movie was a hot mess. I’ve skipped the JW sequels. Black Adam was just bad. I did not think much of Halloween 2018 (huge fan of the original) and heard the legacyquels never really pick up. Enjoyed Love and Thunder, but it did seem to lack the energy and novelty of Ragnarok. I havent seen Maverick, but obviously that did well.It seems like a lot (not all, but a lot) of sequels just re-hashed old ideas with nothing new to add. There are always going to be a subset of fans who want the same cold comfort (Jason comes back and kills teens, the dinosaurs are lose on the island, the Empire is back again) just as their are a subset of fans who want something new. It is virtually impossible to please both groups simultaneously (except Maverick, apparently), but that does not stop studios from trying and failing.I love the MCU and the strength of that franchise meant that it could weather the occasional dud (IM2, Thor 2, Eternals) and there was enough goodwill to move past it. But a lot of other franchises do not get that benefit and there seems to be a regressive attitude of making an entertaining story much less important than putting the characters people want to see on the screen.
How is Dr Strange 2 which is the best performing MCU movie of the year a disappointment (which it is, relatively) and Wakanda Forever, the follow up to one of the most successful MCU movie ever that does barely half of what the first movie did (and when the price of tickets is 20% higher than in 2019), is a success ? Wakanda Forever is in fact the big disappointment.
The real question is, in 2022 did IP too freely?