No More Franchises

4 min readNo more movie franchises. No more shared universes. No more post-credits scenes. No more prequels. No more reboots. No more eight-hour streaming TV spin-offs. No more slates and phases. No more multiverses. No more crossovers.No more movies that are only made to greenlight sequels. No more sequels made for getting you to sign up for a streamer that raises its monthly subscription price every year. No more Easter eggs. No more winks. No more fourth-wall breaks. No more action scenes that halt the story and are clearly directed by the second unit. No more teasers that lead to nothing. No more Harry Styles in Eternals. No more watch guides and chronological order explainers and breakdowns. No more asking, “Is it canon?”No more four-quadrant tentpoles. No more movies based on kids’ stuff that my niece can’t actually watch. No more Superman movies that are so violent and destructive that they trigger my 9/11 survivor mother’s PTSD. No more R-rated films that sell Funkos. No more movies that have to appeal to foreign markets and all the meemaws and pawpaws in Idaho. No more quippy dialogue where characters remark, “Well, THAT just happened!” No more irony. No more grotesque violence set to upbeat pop songs. No more characters looking into their own phones. No more thudding exposition, and especially not in the first ten minutes. No more “no more romances.”No more hiring interesting up-and-coming filmmakers with buzz coming out of Sundance and Telluride because they’re cheap and have credibility to exploit. No more boxing in those same artistes because they’ll say “yes” to all marching orders. No more rejecting established auteurs with an interesting pitch and a desire to play in the sandbox because it doesn’t fit into next summer’s tentpole. No more prioritizing release dates over craft and the well-being of everyone working on it.No more geriatric thespians putting on spandex because today’s adult moviegoer refuses to grow up themselves. No more casting red-hot twenty-somethings and locking them into seven-movie contracts. No more firing those actors because they got into legal trouble so the audience gets gaslit into forgetting there was ever something called The Kang Dynasty. No more international talent getting nothing cool to do; no more Hiroyuki Sanada getting killed by Jeremy Renner in Avengers: Endgame. No more casting directors deciding based on their exact amount of Instagram followers. No more content creators getting cameos.No more of whatever this was:No more Comic-Con. Or rather, no more making Comic-Con into Coachella. No more sleeping on the sidewalks for a seat in Hall H. No more buzzy presentations that turn art and myth into product reveals. No more “we’re doing it for the fans” and “one more thing.” No more Oscar winners promoting movies that don’t even have a script. No more actors lying through their teeth about how they read the original comics growing up. No more trailers that shake the room for those who slept outside to get in, and then get uploaded to YouTube while they collect their sleeping bags.No more press screenings with ridiculous embargoes. No more taking away my phone and stuffing it into a zip pouch because of a spoiler that heaven forbid leaks on TikTok when millions were spent making it in front of IMAX cameras and a unionized crew; no more thinking any of this is tantamount to government secrets. No more influencers on red carpets. No more junket “interviews” that are just quizzes and games. No more gushing. No more unprofessionalism.No more studios that exist only to adapt in-house IP. No more C-suites rambling about the lucrative potential in old cartoons and ‘90s comic books like old-timey oil barons surveying land. No more touting the box office of one movie as evidence why they oughta make a dozen more. No more pretenses about the power of stories in earnings calls with Merrill Lynch. No more forgetting, and not giving healthy royalties to, the comic book creators whose imaginations filled the calendar slate and fueled the stock prices in the first place.No more toxic fandoms. No more powerful studios kowtowing to the loudest, most obnoxious YouTubers who make a living screaming into microphones in their basements. No more chuds who bemoan wokeness in whatever the latest remake/sequel they’re supposed to be mad about, and use AI-generated thumbnails of themselves making the dumbest fucking faces with cherry-picked unflattering screenshots of actresses who wouldn’t give them the time of day anyway. No more abusers, sex pests, misogynists, and racists anywhere, let alone in charge.Chris Delmas//Getty Images🤢No more ten-year plans. No more stoking tuckered-out fans to drum up excitement about the next Batman or James Bond. No more actors keeping up action figure physiques while they wait years to hear about the sequel. No more taking characters and stories people have spent their lives escaping into for comfort and deforming them into numbers on a spreadsheet. No more vague bullshit like “It didn’t capture the zeitgeist” to explain why you’re arm-swiping everything off the table again. No more using the word “zeitgeist” if you cannot define it without ChatGPT.No more cowardice. No more promises no one can keep. No more of this circus. No more.No more of these goddamn things.