Everyone Loves a Good Sequel
Can a story ever truly end?
With The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes hitting theaters this weekend, I’ve been thinking a lot about the current state of long-form storytelling. As we settle comfortably into the 2020s, it grows ever clearer that we’ve left the era where stories serve as self-contained, carefully plotted microcosms of the human experience. Gone are the days where we’d sit down to take in a film and leave two hours later with a sense of insular satisfaction. These days they feel nearly exclusively open-ended. Even moments that should hit like a truck, like the unexpected death of a long-beloved character, hit more like a traffic light when we know for a fact that it won’t be the last time we see them — whether it’s through a ret-con or a prequel, once you make your love for something known, it’s all but guaranteed you’ll be force-fed it through installment after installment until you can’t bear to look at it another moment.
That being said, serialization isn’t innately a hindrance to a good story. Some of the greatest stories ever told have unfolded in large-scale chapters. And the practice of adapting or expanding standalone works into more ambitious, serialized works isn’t at all new. There was a time when a sequel meant a brand new narrative that expanded and deepened an existing world, making use of a larger budget to tell a broader, more complex story. The problem in question regards stories that are expanded strictly for the sake of expansion with little to no attention paid to what made the original story resonate, or what it was trying to express in the first place. if you look at the latest MCU entry, for example (not to kick a horse that’s been dead for a good few years), the continuation of that whole story is serving no narrative purpose. It’s not even a story anymore. It’s a corporation mass-producing a product to make money. There’s no genuine artistic voice. There’s no sense of where the “story” is heading. There used to be! But ever since 2019, the Marvel machine has stripped all narrative cohesion from its product in favor of maintaining a 24-hour theme park based entirely on name recognition and cycles of referentiality so surface-level and rapid that watching a movie feels akin to scrolling through Twitter for two hours. Actually, it’s probably more accurate to say “the Disney machine” — just look at what they’ve done with Star Wars.
This has become the model for long-form storytelling in the 2020s. Stories charge infinitely toward meager nothingness out of fear that shutting a door will have too great an opportunity cost, not just financially, but also in terms of maintaining cultural relevance. Star Wars can’t even bring itself to look beyond the same three recycled settings — what happened to “a galaxy far far away?”
To be clear, I’m speaking pretty strictly in terms of the capital-I Industry. I don’t mean to suggest that there aren’t exceptional, self-contained stories being financed and produced by mainstream studios, and I further don’t mean to imply that all serialized narratives currently in production are inherently bad. The Spider-Verse series, for example, tells a story that literally forces us to admit that it’s stupid to keep beloved characters eternally confined to the scripts they’ve always followed — by rooting for Miles Morales, we’re inherently rooting against “the script,” against the types of stories we’ve convinced ourselves are the only ones worth telling. And I’ve heard pretty good things about the new Hunger Games. But to be honest, I don’t think that Spider-Verse is going to become the norm. As radically meta-textual as Across the Spider-Verse was, it still had its fair share of painful MCU winks and empty references. And many of those self-contained stories currently being produced are anything but safe from having their solid endings gutted in favor of giving more screen time to a character that trended on Twitter for a few days, even if you write the greatest ending in storytelling history. Things like this happens all the time in TV, Game of Thrones being a notable (if not a bit more complex) recent example.
It’s easy to complain about this from behind my little laptop screen, especially when the bar for our serials has become so laughably low, but I think that cultural moments like this have the potentially to actually be really healthy for the entertainment industry. When shit gets bad, we want to figure out why. And folks have been taking to the internet to deconstruct why and how these hollow, shitty, DLC shows, prequels, and spinoffs keep getting made and why they keep making money. So what’s the consensus? There are a lot of potential factors to fault. You could place the blame squarely on the rise of the MCU and the subsequent rush to build literally any possible story into a cinematic multiverse. You could point the finger at the “death of the movie star,” and the shift in loyalty away from artists and toward brand names. Or you could bemoan the dominance of streaming, and the fact that no one has to fight for your dollar by making genuinely good art anymore, since your streaming services have a feeding tubed hooked up to your wallet whether or not you actually watch what they’re offering. In reality, it’s all of this and more — sequels have always been mostly about making money, so it’s not too wild to imagine that this was always where we’d eventually end up. But is it too much to ask for that to be where the drive to explore and broaden and grow begins, not where it stops? I don’t know. For now, we can just continue to tell good stories to anyone who will listen.
