Not Everything Needs To Be A Cinematic Universe

It’s no secret that the Marvel Cinematic Universe is dominating the entertainment industry, and with good reason. So, it’s no surprise that many other studios are attempting to do the same thing. What makes the MCU so successful is the foundation it first laid out with individual characters and stories to get us invested and watch them grow. The Dark Universe failed because it struggled to make people invested in the individual movies and characters. A monster mash-up sounds interesting in theory, but if no time is spent making us care about the movies they’re in then audiences won’t care about the monsters getting together.

Stories Profit More Than Trends

With so many studios trying to make a cinematic universe, it could feel like no one is making new, individual, movies anymore. It isn’t true, but the feeling can get overwhelming. The movie Her is a beautiful film about a man falling in love with an AI. It’s now considered to be one of the greatest films of all time. It doesn’t need a sequel or the next movie to connect it to a larger story. Her takes time to get to know the main character, his conflict, his journey, and his resolution, that’s what audiences fell in love with.

They Mostly Fail

There were many reasons why the Justice League movie failed. One of the biggest ones was not giving the audience enough time to get invested in the heroes. What the DCEU did correctly did not give us another origin story, as they understood we knew who these people are and origin stories are starting to be played out. However, they failed to give most of the heroes reasons why we should care about them. It felt like batman said “I think something evil is coming, so we need to team up.” and everyone just kind of went with it. Then generic villain number one appeared and the heroes beat him up. There were no stakes, real conflict, or reasons that we should care about who our heroes are and why we should care about them.

Stand Alone Movies Still Succeed

The stand-alone movies are what make shared universe movies work. Wonder Woman was a great film that gave people hope for the DCEU and remains to be one of their better movies. Joker surprised audiences when it didn’t connect to a batman movie and barely qualified for an origin story. It gave the fans exactly what they wanted, an insane Joker story. Limitless gave us a concept instead of world-building to keep us interested, what would you do if you could access 100% of your brain capacity. These movies did well because they took their time to build up these characters, their stories, and their arcs. They managed to succeed and didn’t need to be a part of a larger story.