Harlan, he bought this place in the '80s
from a Pakistani real estate millionaire.
Oh, shut up, Blanc.
Shut up!
Shut up with that Kentucky Fried Foghorn Leghorn drawl.
Today it seems every film is produced with an eye
on making a franchise.
There's no such thing as stand-alone stories
with a beginning, middle, and end.
It's all universe building, video game tie ins,
and TV shows expanding on the mythology, which simply put
means that the true movie sequel is dead.
Wait, hold on.
What just happened?
But before we get into today's episode,
please be sure to subscribe to Nerdstalgic to stay up
to date with everything we have going on.
Knives Out, released in 2019, is a throwback
to the classic Agatha Christie whodunit movies of yesteryear.
The film was a box office smash and combined
the best of what old Hollywood had
to offer with a star-studded cast and a brilliantly
constructed screenplay.
The picture introduces Daniel Craig's Benoit Blanc
as the world's greatest detective
who must solve a seemingly impossible murder case.
So who the [BLEEP] is that?
From the devilishly charming performances
by actors such as Chris Evans and Ana de Armas to twists
and turns that could practically give an audience whiplash,
Knives Out succeeded in bringing back
a virtually forgotten genre into mainstream
cinematic prominence.
And just like any original film that
exceeds expectations, Netflix purchased the rights all
to create yet another filmic franchise and with any luck
a cinematic universe.
For those not in the know, there is a tradition
of murder mystery novels and films
where each sequel that's produced is a standalone case,
and the only real reoccurring character is the detective.
And for Johnson and Craig, it was clear from the jump
that they wanted this character to be Benoit Blanc.
And thanks to Craig's effortless charisma,
silky smooth Southern accent, and rakish aplomb,
it looks like they'll get the opportunity
to produce many stories following
their ingenious co-creation.
A doughnut hole in a doughnut's hole.
But we must look a little closer.
The follow up film Glass Onion--
A Knives Out Mystery was just recently released from Netflix,
and it follows a similar trajectory to the first film.
It's a stand-alone story where the audience does not
need to have any specific connection to Benoit,
the world, or the sprawling ensemble cast
to be able to enjoy the story.
However, if this picture has proved one thing
it's that true movie equals are dead.
Glass Onion is what this film should have been titled,
but it wasn't because Netflix was worried
that a general audience wouldn't know
it was a sequel to Knives Out.
Making a good movie isn't the litmus test
for whether something succeeds or fails these days.
Netflix paid over $450 million in order
to have a marquee name that would draw in new subscribers,
not just make a good film.
It's so dumb.
It's so dumb, it's brilliant.
No!
It's just dumb.
The Benoit Blanc movies are a direct homage
to the aforementioned Christie's Hercule Poirot stories
as as such this new installment follows him
as he's summoned to an island paradise
by a reclusive tech giant who wants to throw a murder mystery
party for his friends, only shock
of all shocks and actual murder happens during this island
getaway.
There's exactly one scene in this film that builds off
of the character that we saw in Knives Out, one
featuring Hugh Grant as Benoit Blanc's husband.
Other than that, the film is completely
standalone in this same exact way
that the Poirot stories are, and you
know what none of the titles of his adventures have in them?
A Hercule Poirot mystery, which leads us back
to Rian Johnson's Glass Onion--
A Knives Out Mystery.
When asked about the title in a piece for Vulture,
he explained I tried hard to make them self-contained.
Honestly, I'm pissed off that we have A Knives Out Mystery
in the title.
I wanted to just be called Glass Onion,
and this underscores the exact point.
Even when it's what the audiences want and thematically
linked back to the spiritual forebears in the genre,
today's industry won't let a film not be a part of something
bigger.
It's so dumb.
The brand awareness is a necessity at this point,
not an added positive.
We don't need a Benoit Blanc Begins
and we don't need A Massive Mystery Benoit Origins
and we definitely don't need the subtitle A Knives Out Mystery.
This studio mindset is a direct byproduct
of the hyper-sequelized filmic landscape of the late '80s,
'90s, and early 2000s.
In the '80s, the film industry pivoted away
from auteur-driven pieces of art and leaned
into more commercially-minded pieces of entertainment.
During this shift, something about how
the studios calculated the likelihood of success
of a project changed.
With every successive decade, two words
became more and more valuable, brand awareness,
and for better or for worse, the MCU capitalized off this trend
and propelled it to an almost unthinkable level.
In 2009 when Disney bought Marvel for $4 billion,
no one could have anticipated that they'd
have virtually taken over Hollywood
close to a decade later.
With 30-something films, countless TV shows,
and a near never-ending tidal wave of content
coming down the pike, it doesn't seem
to be letting up any time soon, and that effect
can be seen directly in how the producers of today
attempt to build every film project so that it's
constructed with sequels in mind and at best
a cinematic universe.
The Conjuring has eight films in its universe.
John Wick, Star Wars, Dune, Fast and Furious,
they all have ambitions of making
vast tapestries of interconnected
networks of characters to thrill audiences
with, stories that flow one into the next, chapters
of a sweeping narrative, and there's
nothing wrong with this style of filmmaking.
It's just usually called television.
Studios don't make standalone equals anymore,
thus production companies and studios
are incentivized to chase franchise money.
This initially manifested as anything you
can put a two, three, or four on the end of,
and now it's a subtitle that hints
at an interconnected universe of a wider tapestry of stories--
A Star Wars Story, X-Men Origins,
and Fast and Furious Presents.
Today if a studio film doesn't pull
in a half a billion dollars, did the movie really ever come out?
No!
Of the 10 highest grossing movies released in 2022,
all of them were sequels, and all but two of them
are legacy brands based on characters that have
existed for multiple decades.
From a business perspective, it's readily apparent
why producers and studio executives
are attempting to build off a nascent brand
awareness to activate potential audiences because moviegoers
have shown that's what they're willing to pay for.
However, the tragedy of the case at hand
is that the quality of film projects and film going
experiences is degrading with every passing year.
It's ironic that the big budget theatrical experience is slowly
devolving into an episodically fueled sequential narrative
experience while TV is undergoing
an immense period of revitalization and reinvention.
New, bold, and exciting things are
being done on the small screen while the cineplex, the place
that used to create indelible and iconic images
is slowly degrading into a swamp of cool blue color correction
and superhero sky lasers.
Knives Out and Glass Onion are two
supremely well-constructed films.
They have a cast of the biggest actors on Earth
and a director who knows exactly what he's doing.
So why wasn't that enough to just title the film Glass
Onion?
Because movie studios aren't really in the business
of selling movies.
They're in the business of maintaining attention.
They want you to plop down in front of your phone
or tablet and stream for as long as possible in the hopes
that the infinite void they've constructed will in some way
recoup their investment by pulling
enough people into their orbit, and the easiest way
to gobble up your attention is to springboard off
a brand you are aware of.
That's why true sequels don't get made more.
The studios have conditioned people
to hunger for connectivity and intertextuality
from their media, and now when something doesn't have it,
we don't show up.
So what does this mean about the filmmaking
industry going forward?
It says that we live in a brave new world, one
that it doesn't look like any of us are quite prepared for.
Well, that's all we have for today's episode.
What do you think?
Will we see a return to true sequels soon?
Can you think of a true sequel that was produced
in the last five years?
Let us in the comments below.
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