The story I'm setting up now is meant to stand alone for the first part and then the next two parts have greater connectivity but will be digestible as single volumes.* Which is the format I think should be used for most movie series. The Matrix actually did this and Pirates of the Caribbean attempted this, even though 2 and 3 were shit. (I couldn't even sit through Pirates 3.) And Star Wars did this too now that I think about it. I'm following the lead of 1 - stand alone, 2 - a hanging thread in the overall plot but some form of resolution in a smaller plot, and 3 - conflict resolved. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems most "failed" trilogies are the ones that buck this structure. If you do 1 - stand alone, 2 - stand alone, then a third begins to feel excessive. Maybe it has to do with a 2/3 combo feeling like an adequate raising of the stakes involved.
Kinda went off on a tangent here, but what I was getting at is that a lot of films these days seem to think that their first movie should contain the structure of a second movie and in the process, create some horrid hybrid of a film missing characters (because two films worth of people can't be in a single film) and no proper introduction to the people we DO have... which means we can't give a shit about most of the characters on screen. I mean, if Empire were the first SW movie to come out, we miss out on really getting to know Luke and Han. Leia and the droids too, but Luke and Han are the ones that suffer the most dramatically, so it's important that we have some connection to them. The Vader reveal loses its punch. Obi-wan's death would probably be some flashback but who the fuck cares? He's just some random old man.
And then we have things like Terminator 2 and Aliens, some of the best sequels that, honestly, could've completed the series then and there. I also felt Spider-Man 2 and X-Men 2 were satisfactory closers for me. We've gotten nothing of value from any of those franchises ever since. If their other films never existed, no one would suffer for it. But probably the main difference is that action is probably more sequel friendly that a comedy. Can you think of a comedy that got a part 2 that was as awesome as Terminator 2 was in comparison to its first film? I don't know if something like Zoolander or Anchorman can have a successful 2. But I'm biased because I severely dislike most modern comedy films anyway. I liked The Proposal and The Heat. Neither one needed a sequel though.
*I do actually have a part 4 but it's still raw in terms of how I'm going to structure it.
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^ Yeah, I wrote a lot. It's 3:50 in the morning. Maybe I had too much coffee.
Oh, and I saw Outlander. Not the series with the chick who goes into the past, the sci-fi Beowulf film starring Jesus. It was actually much, much better than I expected it to be. Some parts of it are kinda paint-by-numbers and the faux-Viking village aspect of it is half-assed with actors have lots of weird accents. They should've gotten some actually Nordic actors or changed the setting. And the sci-fi part of it is played down more than it should've been. I think Jesus blasts something with his space gun, like, once and then his space gear gets written out of the movie. Still, I don't think it deserve to flop like it did. It had some cool ideas.
