‘Batman v. Superman,’ ‘Star Wars’ and Hollywood’s New Obsession With the “Requel,” as explored by the Hollywood Reporter:
Holy box office! The industry’s latest trend isn’t a sequel or reboot, it’s a hybrid engineered to capture nostalgia and launch a new (and lucrative) film universe.
Hollywood’s done the remakes, reboots, prequels and threequels. The latest obsession: the “requel,” a movie that’s both a reboot and a sequel, blending old with new in an effort to extend the life of a franchise and, in the best cases, reinvent it for a “universe” of follow-up movies.
Regarding “Batman v. Superman v. your sense of hearing,” last week James Lileks wrote:
If you’d told me as a child that the future would contain almost nothing but superhero movies with all my favorite characters, and that my future self wouldn’t be surprised if they greenlit “Fin Fang Foom v Paste-Pot Pete” I would have looked up in confusion: “What do you mean, greenlit? I don’t understand the term.”
Never mind, that’s not the point. All your childhood joys will be brought to life at the cost of billions of dollars, shown in 3-D on indoor screens the size of the Starlight Drive-in. You win. The kids win. All your stories become the dominant American cultural product.
I would have been ecstatic. But I wouldn’t have expected that I would tire of the bombast, the unreality of the action, the feeling of leaving the theater with a lacerated spleen. I wouldn’t have thought that I’d put on the earlier Michael Bay movies because now they looked like Ingmar Bergman stories of a guy playing chess for an hour.
So I’m done. Except for the next Captain America, which is a great series of movies. In the next one he fights Iron Man! Good. If anyone needs a good beatdown by a God-fearing patriotic man with a sense of decorum, it’s Tony Stark. I also hope they make more Ant-Man and Thor, and hopes are high for Dr. Strange. He’s a magician! And he fights a guy whose head is on fire. Awesome!
I wonder what used to keep grown-ups from being excited about such things. Besides shame, that is.
As I wrote here last week, if you’re wondering how Hollywood went from Gone with the Wind, Citizen Kane and Casablanca, to Batman Versus Superman and Quentin Tarantino’s entire oeuvre, the remarkably influential 1960s-1970s-era New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael is the linchpin between old and new Hollywood. But as Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader (whose early career Kael championed) once said, “It was fun watching the applecart being upset. but now where do we go for apples?”