KRR: So, Prequels, Sequels, and Threequels, Oh My!

Note: Canadian movie theaters are just now beginning to reopen in my area, so I'm gonna be covering a bunch of summer movies that have been out for awhile in America, but are just now getting to international audiences. 

Hollywood has an intellectual property (IP) problem. It goes far beyond Disney's onslaught of Marvel content (half a dozen TV shows and four movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe this year alone!). It plagues every company, every studio, and seemingly every major creator that works in Hollywood today. Gone are the one-and-done days of blockbuster film. Now, everything must be a brand, must have a franchise, must expand into its own "universe."

While we're going to devote more time on this page to Black Widow and F9 in the coming weeks, the two biggest blockbusters of the summer, representing Marvel and the Fast and the Furious, the two most important franchises respectively right now - in the meantime, let's shift the focus to three of the other big names on the 2021 film calendar: Cruella, A Quiet Place Part II, and The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (a.k.a The Conjuring 3). 

Sorry Vin Diesel, but this is mi familia.

-SPOILERS FOR ALL THREE FILMS AHEAD-

Allow me to be the first to say that each of these three films are deserving of their own reviews; however, what struck me most while watching them was what they implicated, rather than what they contained. That's why we're here reviewing three of the year's biggest movies as a collective. Because none of them are original.

Cruella, a prequel to the animated movie One Hundred and One Dalmatians, is an amalgamation of Disney's worst aspects: Cheap storytelling done in expensive fashion, the hedonistic indulgence of a movie studio with money to burn, a project born for profit, not passion. 

A Quiet Place Part II, on the other hand, at least has the original concept from A Quiet Place, though replicated and expanded upon in this sequel. A sequel is always supposed to be the flipping of a pillow, going from something known and worn to offering the other side, something just as comfortable but new (and in the case of a pillow - cooler). A Quiet Place Part II doesn't necessarily flip the pillow for you. Instead, it rolls you over - same pillow, different angle. 

And, of course, there's The Conjuring 3, which is the third Conjuring film, but the eighth in the ever-growing Conjuring Universe: Warner Brothers' attempt at replicating a horror version of the MCU. Just like the last two Conjuring movies, the third is a sensationalized retelling of a real-life case taken on by demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren. If this threequel were a pillow, you wouldn't exactly be getting the cooler side, you'd be getting moved to a different bed entirely. 

The Devil would give you a nice back crack on the way to your next bed!

Besides the fact that these are all horror movies - is it okay to classify Cruella as a horror movie? I mean, it's supposed to be about a woman who kills dogs?? - they share very little in common. One tells the story of an orphan girl overthrowing a fashion empire, one recounts the real-ish events of a man pleading innocent to murder because the Devil possessed him, and another shows how children stand up and attempt to conquer sound-seeking monsters. They're all over the place conceptually. Yet, they all serve one purpose: To flesh out larger universes, to open up space for more films and spin-offs to slot into place. Storytelling plays second-fiddle to universe-creation for these films. And that's a huge problem.

It's nothing new for companies such as Disney, Paramount, and Warner Brothers to set up and market franchises while participating in them. Obviously, every movie is more than a movie. Sometimes it's a soundtrack, sometimes it's a toy line, sometimes it's an amusement park, sometimes it's all three. 

Can't believe the most successful business in the world is based on a fucking mouse. Like seriously?

And sometimes, it's an attempt to embed that content so deeply into the culture that it permeates the rest of our lives. When One Hundred and One Dalmatians came out in 1961, even the heads at Disney couldn't see a "Dalmatians Universe" ahead of them. It would have been an unthinkable, endlessly confusing concept at the time. What did happen, and what was probably conceivable even in 1961, was a remake of the movie with real life actors. That happened thirty five years later, when Glenn Close donned the mantle of Cruella and 101 Dalmatians was released. Still though, blowing up that live-action remake into something large enough to contain multiple storylines centered around the original animated film probably seemed like fantasy. Not so anymore. Not only has Cruella burst into every home in the world, it's only the first unwanted guest in what could be a very long line of more to come. Disney has already greenlit a Cruella 2, which I would have assumed is just 101 Dalmatians, but apparently, it isn't. Will there be a Cruella 3 in 2026? Will we get a hundred movies of backstory for each dog, leading up to another remake of One Hundred and One Dalmatians? Probably not, because even that is too absurd, but a children's television series of anthological episodes depicting the life of a different Dalmatian each time can't totally be ruled out, can it?

I'd be willing to give the show a chance, but only about that one dog really close to the TV. That one is me.

Disney, while being the largest perpetrator of universe-creation, is far from the only one however. Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought that when The Conjuring came out in 2013, would there be seven more movies that stemmed from it in seven more years. Yet, here we are. Warner Brothers has taken the MCU's model and applied it to the horror genre, giving unknowable longevity to the Conjuring series and kickstarting a number of others: Including The Nun and Annabelle. Preparing one's self for a new Conjuring movie already takes a bit of digging into the franchise's past, but we're only a few years out from a mega-Conjuring Universe crossover that requires horror homework, spanning over a dozen movies and multiple franchises. Are we ready for that? Or, better yet, do we even want that?

The Marvel Cinematic Universe, the blueprint for this new content creation, is undoubtedly one of my favorite series in movie culture, and it's been wildly successful as well. The same can be said for the borderless Star Wars Universe, which has drifted far, far away from the original concept pitched by George Lucas when he first wrote Star Wars. But do we need more of these universes, especially cinematic universes that don't actually expand into the universe itself, like Marvel and Star Wars do? I think not. I thought it was cool when Fox decided to do a Simpsons movie, but there definitely wasn't a need for a whole series of them, plus spin-off shows and film franchises about Mr. Burns. Nowadays though, that's probably what we would get if that show was just beginning. 

Don't even think about it Fox.

Of course, the one exception to this universe-creating rule may end up being A Quiet Place Part II. While John Krasinski's silent-ish horror sequel picks up directly where the original ends off, and expands the world both literally in size and conceptually in time (through the use of flashbacks), there's no telling if Krasinski and Paramount want to explore that world by creating a largescale cinematic universe. We may simply end up with a trilogy of horror movies. Maybe it's unwise to do a third, just as it was unnecessary to do a sequel, but that doesn't usually stop movie studios. (Look at The Hangover, for example.) 

The difference is in the past a film studio would stop themselves from doing anymore than three or four movies in a successful franchise. They'd let it sit for awhile and in thirty years when they need a new marketing campaign, they'd drudge up the old actors and try to pass the torch off to a new generation - think Shia LeBeouf in that awful fourth Indiana Jones movie. Now though, for The Quiet Place to stop at three, four, even five films would be abnormal. It would be seen as a missed opportunity, a waste of money, a cinematic universe that could have been.

How about A Quiet Place YouTube series where the monsters listen to the greatest albums of all time and give their opinions? I'd watch that.

And you know what? That's fine. As a viewer, I don't want to feel like I have to do homework to watch every new movie that comes out. I'll do it for some, sure. I'll catch up on Marvel movies or Star Wars movies. We all have our own cups of tea. Maybe you're looking for more and more Mamma Mia! content. (I'm not opposed.) But Hollywood doesn't need to churn out cinematic universes, a dime a dozen. Hollywood's addiction to IP will only harm it in the long run, when audiences turn off Disney+ because they don't want to watch The Dalmatians Episode 76, when movie executives won't greenlight new, original passion projects, when everything is labeled as "the most ambitious crossover of all time."

You know what's genuinely ambitious? Letting your work be. Let it be, Hollywood. 

And please, stop trying to make me root for Cruella because she has good fashion. She kills dogs.

Also, there's only like three Dalmatians in the whole movie. A scam, Disney. A SCAM.

Cruella KRR: 3.3/10

A Quiet Place Part II KRR: 7.9/10

The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It KRR: 3.3/10