Shared movie universes, where individual films share a central theme, are considered a way to boost Hollywood's sagging fortunes. But the trend has the director of Guardians of the Galaxy on the defense.
James Gunn wrote bluntly on Facebook expressing his worries about shared universes. He believes studios are focusing too much on the big picture of the whole franchise and not being focused enough on making a great movie.
Studios are "trying to grow trees without a strong seed," he writes. He cited Star Wars as making sense as a shared universe, since there's something to base the franchise on there, and with movies like Iron Man and Batman Begins, audiences were demanding more of these films. But now studios are planning out big franchises without really having a strong base to start with.
The big picture of a franchise should never get in the way of making a great film that stands by itself, he maintains. "This new business model is flawed. I think filmmakers and studios should be prepared for the big picture, but never, ever let it get in the way of making a single great film. Be a little more experimental and see what works as opposed to trying to force success," he writes on Facebook.
Gunn has a point. Marvel launched a franchise in 2008 with Iron Man, a great superhero movie that stood by itself, but with an ending that teased an eventual larger franchise. This lead to films like The Avengers.
There are studios like Universal, which is planning a shared universe of monster movies. The studio seems to have a significant amount of the franchise planned out before a single movie has even been released, though Dracula Untold was retroactively made part of the shared universe.
There's also the example of DC, with a insane lineup of upcoming movies with just a single movie, Man of Steel, under its belt. In this case, it is working off something, but it's still leading to a situation where DC might care more about the overall franchise than about Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice being a good movie by itself.
That's what James Gunn says he tries to do, and he told Yahoo Movies that he tries to keep Guardians of the Galaxy its own thing. "There will be moments where they’ll intersect, but for the most part, it’s not about the Guardians and the Avengers teaming up," he said. "That doesn’t interest me."
The Gunn approach is that each of these movies in the shared universes should stand alone and be good by themselves, and then they also happen to intersect and take place in the same universe.
What do you think of shared movie universes? Does Gunn have a point, or are DC and Universal approaching it the right way?
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