By the time you get to the end of No regrets, Recent from Amazon Tom clancy thriller, it’s easy to feel like what you’ve just seen isn’t so much a movie as it is a commercial for a potential franchise. The entire film is an expanded origin story for Clancy’s recurring protagonist, John T. Clark (Michael B. Jordan), with various elements that were apparently only included to set up future installments, such as barely visible characters played by notable actors such as Colman Domingo Y Jodie Turner-Smith.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg in terms of how No regrets he wears his origin story feature on his sleeve. In a clunky closing scene, the film explains how Clark was given a new identity and began working for the CIA to become the character that Rainbow Six fans know and love. Not since the sweaty explanation of Han Solo’s name in Solo: A Star Wars Story Has a movie so wrongly assumed our personal interest in knowing why a man is called a thing?
A mid-credits scene showing a film adaptation of Rainbow six finally establish what No regrets was building. It’s not a satisfying resolution for an exciting story, but rather a tease for John Clark’s next great adventure included in the film’s end credits. Such a hint about the future doesn’t inspire excitement, it just exacerbates the feeling that you’ve seen a two-hour prologue. Wasting the talent of Michael B. Jordan on such a stunted production is criminal. Losing an audience’s time with him is even more.
No regrets It’s not the only recent store to engage in this kind of backwards storytelling. The film was released just a week after the expected debut of the new Mortal Kombat restart. Despite what its title suggests, the film itself never makes the title tournament. Instead of, Mortal Kombat ends with Lord Raiden (Tadanobu asano) successfully assembling a team of fighters to eventually compete in Mortal Kombat, one day.
There is no concrete resolution here, just the promise of future movies and a final Johnny Cage Easter Egg meant to get audiences excited. Meanwhile, Shang Tsung (Chin They have) always lurks at the edges of history, promising to eventually become the franchisee’s equivalent to Thanos if more installments occur. His lack of a clear purpose undermines this specific story’s main antagonist, Sub-Zero (Joe Taslim), and it only reinforces how this movie has nothing but sequels in the brain.
Both No regrets Y Mortal Kombat Show what can happen when you emphasize establishing a franchise rather than telling a good story. These two films are not the only victims of this phenomenon. Last summer failed Birds of Artemis The adaptation is a lengthy prologue that sets the title character and his motley crew of fantasy weirdos. The film’s finale sees the entire cast flying into the sunset, vowing to do a true indie adventure next time if the box office income is good enough.
More examples of this approach can be seen in everything from Warcraft to 2018 tomb Raider reboot to Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. However, the 2017 reboot of The Mummy it may be the most egregious recent example. The film was intended to launch Universal’s doomed Dark Universe franchise, The Mummy He abruptly pauses his story to introduce Prodigium, a secret monster watchdog organization similar to Marvel’s SHIELD, supposed to get people excited about what might lie within this larger universe. But by stopping the story in its tracks to provoke possible sequels, it only makes an already weak narrative harder to bear.
All of these movies are laser focused on placing pieces on a board, but they are much less interested in playing with those pieces. Setting plots to explore across multiple movies isn’t inherently a bad idea, but it can’t be the sole purpose of your movie. If you use your franchise starter potential to deliver an entertaining story, your audience will want to see more first and foremost. This is how a franchise is born, not through two hours of preparation for sequels.
A great example of how to do this correctly is the movie from 2015. Mad Max: Fury Road. Being as much a soft reboot of the franchise as the first Mad max movie in decades, one could easily imagine a version of this movie that spends most of its running time painstakingly resetting the universe for a new audience, such as Mortal Kombat Y No regrets. Instead of, Path of fury takes it upon himself to establish who Max is in a short burst of opening voice work before launching into the most exciting two hours of action in recent memory. It’s hard to imagine this movie offering the same level of unforgettable visual storytelling if it had focused on setting up an extended universe of sequels.
Ironically, Path of fury it even manages to inspire a desire for much better sequels than movies like No regrets. This new 21st century vision of George millerThe world of Mad Max is so compelling and packed with small details that stimulate the imagination. So much care has been taken to tell this thread well that it is easy to imagine countless stories told in this area. Once the credits continue Path of fury, you have an insatiable urge to see even more. A good story captivates the mind. A feature film prologue simply satisfies studio directors looking at the numbers on a spreadsheet.
Not all movies can be Mad Max: Fury RoadBut more could follow the example of your decision to focus on telling a story rather than setting up an entire cinematic universe in one go. No regrets Y Mortal Kombat It might have had viewers eager for more adventures on their worlds if they had more to offer than the teasing of the sequel. In today’s Hollywood landscape of every studio struggling to invent its own Marvel Cinematic Universe, films like these forget that to inspire successful sequels, you must first deliver an engaging opening film. That’s the task No regrets He struggles to deliver even as he works so hard to establish a larger mega-franchise.
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