Someone on Twitter said this is the best piece about the upcoming Star Wars movie, and I think he’s right. But it’s not so much about Star Wars specifically as it is about how Hollywood studios are trying to build infinite series of movies.
These new movies won’t just be sequels. That’s not the way the transnational entertainment business works anymore. Forget finite sequences; now it’s about infinite series. […] Everywhere, studio suits are recruiting creatives who can weave characters and story lines into decades-spanning tapestries of prequels, side-quels, TV shows, games, toys, and so on. Brand awareness goes through the roof; audiences get a steady, soothing mainline drip of familiar characters.
Forget the business implications for a moment, though. The shared universe represents something rare in Hollywood: a new idea. It evolved from the narrative techniques not of auteur or blockbuster films but of comic books and TV, and porting that model over isn’t easy. It needs different kinds of writers and directors and a different way of looking at the structure of storytelling itself. Marvel prototyped the process; Lucasfilm is trying to industrialize it.
Harry Potter could be a great infinite series, but it’ll be interesting to see if Rowling is interested in heading in that direction. Ditto Middle-earth and Tolkien.
Worldbuilding as explored by Alex McDowell adapting Philip K Dick’s Minority Report for film, and now theorizing creative workflows at USC film school.