The trend in films that Harry Potter launched is now dying out. Young adult fiction used to be the hot ticket at the cinema, and the film adaptation of the Potter series was the template that most of the series’ launched in its wake used. Mostly faithful adaptations that split the last book in the series into two films in order to stave off the end of films and wring a few more dollars out of an enthusiastic crowd. It worked for Harry Potter, it worked for Twilight, it worked for the Hunger Games but now it’s not working anymore. Take Divergent, a series of frankly terrible movies that strictly followed that same template to diminishing returns at the box office.
That series, the plot of which I won’t retell largely because doing so gives me an angry headache, is ending as a TV movie, the last half of the split final book not actually reaching theatres. Going on a TV screen is not the downgrade it was when I was a youth, the large amount of money places like HBO, Amazon and Netflix are throwing at original content has made television roughly equivalent of the theatre in production design and possibly larger in scope. However, to switch formats late in the game is an admission by the producers of the Divergent series that there is a fundamental problem with their series, in that nobody is going very far out of their way to see it.
As a fan of film, this is fantastic news. Not really because I want the Divergent series to fail – though I certainly thought it was a bad one – but because I want the practice of telling deliberately incomplete stories in film to end. One of the many things I love about movies is that they’re finite. A great film tells the entire story, with a beginning, middle and an end, and you don’t have to have outside knowledge to appreciate it. I don’t hate TV, but it takes a commitment to get through a television series, a commitment I don’t always want to make. After all, we only have so much time, and I like to spend my time on the couch with something that will be finished when the credits roll.
That’s not actually what studios seem to want, there’s a trend towards having stories on multiple formats through multiple creative teams that all influence and inform each other, making it increasingly difficult to actually enjoy them as their own works of independent art. Superhero films have become the worst at this – watching some of the recent Marvel things made me wonder if I needed a three week correspondence course to follow all of the nonsense the film expected me to know, and some of the really bad ones, like the first Thor movie, felt like two hour trailer for a different movie.
I can understand why studios want to have a giant web of inter-connected content. It means people keep watching their stuff, you have to watch the TV show to understand the film to understand the game to understand the comic. In order to do that, you have to spend a significant amount of time and money on their products, especially money, which makes the whole web of production make financial sense. But it’s also a risky venture, because you have to make something good enough that people want to keep throwing their money at you. Still, if you’ve got a strong property, I can understand doing this approach. I don’t like it, however, because I don’t want to spend all of my time and income keeping track of the daily adventures of these characters, even when I might otherwise like them, because I want to do other things as well, and I like my entertainment more compact.
It’s believable that Divergent’s attempt at wringing every last cent out of a franchise failed largely because the source material wasn’t very good. Maybe the collapse of that franchise will be dismissed as just a case of needing to pick your material better, and studios like Marvel and Warner Bros. – which owns the rights to DC Comics characters – will not lose any sleep over it. But then, Warner has altered their plans for their Batman and Superman franchises after the crossover film didn’t make a billion dollars as rapidly as they would have preferred, so maybe there is some nervousness about how successful multi-year, multi-medium franchises can sustain themselves. I personally hope that they collapse sooner, rather than later, and we can go back to the joy of nice, self-contained films.
Perhaps I’m the only one who is deeply irritated by this trend in film. Maybe everyone else likes having to see several films, TV shows and comics in order to have a clue what is going on screen, and I certainly don’t want to dictate their entertainment. But I, personally, cheered a bit when I saw this attempt at dragging a few more dollars out of a kind of terrible franchise failing spectacularly. I almost want a franchise with some quality to fail as well just to make it less common.
