Every “cinematic universe” contains the seeds of its own destruction

(y’know, just like the real universe)

This show might be great, but I’ll never know

A while ago, I came across a Reddit thread announcing the cancelation of the Disney+ series Star Wars: The Acolyte (a show I’ll admit I haven’t watched, for reasons I’ll get into in a bit). There was a lot of gleeful celebration in comments, but interspersed with it would be an occasional contrasting comment—something along the lines of “Why are you celebrating failure??? Don’t you want people to succeed??? Why are you so cruel??? Why do you care so much???”

It’s a sentiment I can sort-of understand—I’m not wishing harm on anyone involved in the series, or anything—but at the same time, I feel like it misses the point. Whether any of us like it or not, what succeeds or fails today determines what gets produced tomorrow, so if you care at all about movies and TV, you can’t help but take at least a passing interest in what a market leader like Disney is doing. And—judging from the thread—a whole lot of us are sick to death of the industry’s over-reliance on Cinematic Universes™️ and the way they make every new release feel like homework. Fortunately, there are good reasons to believe Cinematic Universes™️ are on the way out, in part because their deaths are inevitable, for a couple of reasons (after the break):

---

Hey there, stranger! Welcome to my newsletter. If you sign up to receive it in your email inbox, I’ll send you e-copies of both my published books for free, and enter you in a drawing to win a signed paperback copy of each. You can scroll to the bottom of this post for more info, or else just enter your email address here:

---

1. Mediocrity is inevitable.

In statistics, they call this phenomenon “regression toward the mean”—which is just a fancy way of saying that exceptional results tend to be followed by less exceptional results. There’s no deep, metaphysical reason for this; it’s just probability: most things, by definition, are average, so average results are more likely than exceptional ones.

You see this with things like “the Madden curse” or “the Best New Artist curse”—supposedly, football players and musical artists go straight from accolades to failure, injury, and obscurity. The explanation, though, is pretty mundane: if you’re getting honored, it’s probably because you’re at the top of your game, and no one can perform at the top of his or her game forever.

The relevance of this becomes clear when you consider that only really good movies tend to get sequels (and then possibly go on to spawn Cinematic Universes™️).

I guess you can quibble with the phrase “really good” if you want; maybe it’s more accurate to say that only financially successful movies tend to get sequels, but I think it’s also fair to say that financial success indicates a movie is doing at least a few things right. Either way, though, the upshot is this: movie franchises almost always start on really high notes and then have nowhere to go but down. In a parallel universe where Star Wars (or “episode four,” or “a new hope,” or whatever it’s called now) is a just-okay movie and not a great one, we probably never would have gotten a bajillion sequels and spinoffs, even though those hypothetical sequels likely would have been improvements on it; but because it was so successful, we’re deluged with a firehose of content, most of which, by sheer statistical law alone, is going to range mainly from “disappointing” to “mind-numbingly mediocre.”

2. Fan conflict is inevitable.

I will happily go on record as being one of those people who thought Star Wars VIII: The Last Jedi was a genuinely great movie (or at least an interesting one), but I will also acknowledge that there are a whole lot of people who disagree with me about this.

I’m not saying that I’m right (even though I am) and they’re wrong (even though they are); I’m just bringing it up because, when I prodded the haters a bit to try to figure out why they disliked it so much, the recurring theme was something along the lines of, “It just didn’t feel like Star Wars.” Some of the objections were fair (“Luke Skywalker didn’t act like the Luke Skywalker I know”), and some were bizarrely specific (“Star Wars shouldn’t have ‘your momma’ jokes”), but the gist was the same: they had a clear idea in their minds of what a Star Wars movie should be like, and The Last Jedi just wasn’t it. But of course what I had liked about it was the exact same thing: it wasn’t afraid to try something different and develop a personality of its own.

And that’s the inevitable conflict you’re always going to run into when you seek to turn a movie into a Cinematic Universe™️: half the people who liked the original film liked it for how much it caught them off-guard, and they’ll want each new installment to surprise them just as much, while the other half will have such affection for the first installment that they’ll want each new one to be like a warm blanket, making them feel the exact same way the first one did, forever. Even if you can deliver on one of these things (a difficult enough task), there’s no way to deliver on both. Best-case scenario, you eventually alienate half your audience. Worst-case? Pretty much everyone walks away disgusted. Which…

3. Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

Given these two inevitabilities, it seems that the only possible endgame (see what I did there?) for a Cinematic Universe™️ is a market flooded with mediocre content and a dwindling fanbase plagued by entitlement and infighting. Which…yeah, nah, that’s pretty much exactly the state of things.¹

I haven’t touched on the “culture war bullshit” angle here, mainly because my sense is that every conflict inevitably takes on a “culture war bullshit” valence in the year of our Lord 2024, regardless of whether it’s really relevant to anything, but we can address it now, if you want: The latest Star Wars thing, The Acolyte, seems to have brought out the worst in everyone involved, from creators to critics to “fans,” half of whom insist that the other half are a bunch of racist manbabies, and half of whom insist that the other half are a bunch of hacks who hide behind woke platitudes to paper over crummy storytelling, and…frankly, they’re probably both right, and they probably both deserve each other. It’d be cool if there were still normal, not-crazy people interested in Star Wars, but this dwindling of the fanbase to nothing but insane, obsessed, mutually-hating people seems to be the inevitable result of the Cinematic Universe™️ conceit.

And anyway, that’s why I—along with many other people, I’m sure—can’t bring myself to watch The Acolyte, or any of the other recent Star Wars stuff. I’ve liked some Star Wars movies, but at the moment, “catching up” with it would require me to wade through dozens of hours of mediocrity…and for what? So I can join a “conversation” that consists of some of the dumbest people to ever live yelling at each other about how space wizards may or may not be racist? Nah, I’m good. There’s just nothing left there for normal people.

But hey! Maybe the inevitable death of Cinematic Universes™️ means we’ll finally get some movies or TV shows that are genuinely fun! A guy can dream, right? 🕹🌙🧸

---

Turn the TV off and read a book

Hey, thanks for reading! If you’re new to this newsletter, here’s how it works: everyone who signs up to receive it in their email inbox gets free e-book copies of both my published books, plus you get entered in a monthly drawing for a free signed paperback copy of each! Why? Because I like you.

So, just for signing up, you’ll get:

• Ophelia, Alive: A Ghost Story, my debut novel about ghosts, zombies, Hamlet, and higher-ed angst. Won a few minor awards, might be good.

• Murder-Bears, Moonshine, and Mayhem: Strange Stories from the Bible to Leave You Amused, Bemused, and (Hopefully) Informed, an irreverent tour of the weirdest bits of the Christian and Jewish Scriptures. Also won a few minor awards, also might

…plus:

• a monthly update on my ✨glamorous life as an author✨ (i.e., mostly stories about me lying around the house, playing videogames, petting my dogs, etc.)

• A monthly short-short!

• “Ask a church receptionist,” where I answer your questions about the Bible, Christianity, and whatever else!

• my monthly thoughts on horror, the publishing industry, and why social media is just the worst.

Just enter your email address below, and you’ll receive a weekly reminder that I still exist:

Congrats to last month’s winners, lindsay.milkop and claudinesantos106! (If you are lindsay.milkop, please reach out to me! I’ve emailed you twice to no response!) I’ll run the next drawing Sept. 1! 🕹🌙🧸

1. Predicting the present is so much easier than predicting the future!