Franchise Fatigue

Captain America: Brave New World was a good movie. 

But The Falcon and the Winter Soldier was a very good television series. I might actually be inclined to say that the Falcon and the Winter Soldier was the most interesting thing anyone has done with Captain America since Ed Brubaker violated the ultimate taboo, brought Bucky back from the dead, and rewrote the mythos so comprehensively that no-one quite realised what he was doing. The TV show drew very deeply from the history of the comic books: Isaiah Bradley, the black man who the American government experimented on, comes from a relatively obscure 2003 comic called Red, White and Black; The USAgent goes right back to a 1980s storyline about Steve Rogers quitting his Captain America gig. But you didn’t need to have read any of the comic books to understand what was going on: it was simply mining old stories to create new ones. 

I grok that Brubaker was a bit annoyed by this. Twenty years on, “everybody knows” that Bucky became the Winter Soldier, where perhaps they ought to still be saying that Ed Brubaker had the audacity and chutzpah and creative disregard for canon to come up with the completely bonkers idea that Cap’s long deceased kid sidekick was alive and well and operating as a mercenary. Writers and artists have got a right to be annoyed by this kind of thing. But Marvel Comics exists and the Marvel Cinematic Universe exists. Jack Kirby threw the ball and Steve Englehart caught the ball and Brubaker only gets to hold the ball on condition he passes it on to someone else. This is why it is nonsense for fans to insist on comic book accuracy. There are no comic books to be accurate to. There are multiple traditions. 

“I want it to be comic book accurate” is usually code for “I don’t want there to be any black people in it”, in any case. 

Some Star Wars fans deplored the fact that the (very good) Mandalorian TV show included some hardware lifted from an old computer game. This was a symptom of a condition called “being up yourself”, apparently. Other Star Wars fans felt that they were debarred from watching the (also very good) Ahsoka TV show because it utilized a character from a cartoon show that they had not, and did not want to, watch. But some of us positively like the baroque complexity of a narrative which emerges non-sequentially, over decades, in more formats than one person can possibly hold in their head. 

CS Lewis said that what the human imagination likes is either taking in a harmonious and self-explanatory form at a single glance; or getting lost in a hugely complicated maze that it will never fully grasp. The Parthenon and the Fairy Queen are both great works of art. So perhaps this kind of fan schism is simply a new iteration of the old, old war between the classical and the romantic. 

Still other fans objected to the (also pretty good) Skeleton Crew TV show because it didn’t have much bearing on the Star Wars metaplot. It’s certainly got lightsabers and spacecraft and recognisable aliens but it doesn’t notably impact on the sacred timeline. I myself have some doubts about whether “the Famous Five, only space pirates” was a great premise for a series, although I smile wryly when people complain that it is “like a children’s show”. My main problem was the paucity of imagination that envisions a galaxy far, far away in which middle-class suburbs look exactly as they do in the American midwest. But that problem has been brewing ever since Obi-Wan went into a diner and put Anakin and Amidala on a greyhound bus. 

And some Star Wars fans objected to the Mandalorian, Ahsoka, and Skeleton Crew because they had black people in them. 

There is Wim and his little friends, trying to extract their spaceship from a garbage crusher. If you don’t think that was the most exciting sequence to appear in a Star Wars spin off since a long time ago, I am not sure I have anything else to say to you. And there are the Sith and the High Republic and Darth Plagueis and Groku’s true identity. There is plot and metaplot; there are movies and franchises; there is this movie and all the movies together. There is chess, and there is a game of chess. Only yesterday I heard someone say that Ncuti Gatwa is not very good as Doctor Who and the solution is, and I quote to reboot the franchise. 

The solution is never to reboot the franchise. 

Ncuti Gatwa is, incidentally, a black man.

Superheroes are archetypes. There is a mild mannered science geek who turns into a fierce green monster if you rub him the wrong way. There is a Norse god stuck in a crippled mortal body until he learns humility. There is an apparently hopeless GI who personifies the stars and stripes and punches Hitler. 

Superhero movies are action-packed entertainments, whose target audience wouldn’t know an archetype if they stubbed their toe on one, in competition with Mission Impossible and Harry Potter and the Rings of Power. 

Superhero franchises—and there is really only one successful one—are great big huge vast overarching metastories. Soap operas that wish they were actual operas.

When Nick Fury popped up unannounced at the end of the first Iron Man movie, it was a jaw-dropping cinematic conceit. We are now as far removed from that first Iron Man movie as Iron Man was from…something which came out seventeen years before Iron Man. Batman Returns, possibly. There had been sequels before, and captions that said “James Bond Will Return”. The people in Jaws 3 knew about Jaws 1. But the idea of one movie bleeding into another movie was a huge, self-affirming pat on the head to all of us who were bullied and belittled for reading obscure American publications when we were kids. It was even more surprising when Robert Downey Jnr and Samuel S Jackson turned up a year later to recruit Edward Norton. Hell, they are serious about this? Twenty years later we still piously sit through ten minutes of credits (hi, Dan, you are definitely my second favourite set-dec-gang-boss) to find out—what? That there will be another movie, with another baddie, and that it will have something to do with the effing sodding bloody multiverse? 

It used to be said that some movies only had highlights so there was something to include in the trailers. Now we suspect that some movies only exist in order to be teased at the end of other movies. The world’s second richest man recently bought James Bond and everyone assumes that he is going to make, not a new James Bond film, but a whole series of interconnected movies set in the 007 Universe. I understand that the Beano now has an internal continuity. Donald Duck has had one for decades. Any day I expect to see Macavity the Mystery Cat teaming up with Oliver Mellors because they are both part of the Faber and Faber extended universe. Which would, I grant you, be awesome.

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