07 Jan Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024)

Fan Service

There’s nothing novel about observing the trap that franchises fall into. The template is what attracts us because we recall a pleasant experience, we understand and like the world, and we trust the story machine. But it runs the risk of being too familiar, even stale.

The Star Wars franchise carried this poorly, I think, where Harry Potter was perhaps the most successful. James Bond stays relatively fresh by tossing the prior worlds and keeping mere story elements.

Filmmakers and their backers need to navigate this carefully. You need enough of the old to allow people to inherit their experience as they re-enter the world, and enough of the new to entice engagement. A problem is that if the mechanisms of engagement are the same, then the novelty is gone, but that’s what appealed in the first place.

So the filmmaking sponsors have milestones that go as early in the process as pre-vis, through to test screenings and redos. But what if the process is as inflexible as Park’s? Where a minute of film could take months?

Catch 22, because anything you do on the one side will hurt the other; novelty versus familiarity. They solved this with Shaun by having the episodes short, the stories snappy and outrageously slapstick. Here, there is too much baggage.

This is not what killed the Chicken Run sequel. That was just lack of charm and weak basics. This is a more fundamental problem that we’ll face as viewers more frequently. The very best sequel in my experience is likely ‘Blade Runner 2049’ which in many ways followed the formula set by Kar Wai Wong’s ’2046’.

As I write this, the third Dune has had all its major decisions made; its balance of world and story. It will be very difficult to do well, so I fear we’ll get over-reliance on story.

Posted in 2024

Ted’s Evaluation — 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

IMDB