Watching any recent sequel to a legacy franchise can feel like you’re playing nostalgia bongo, with the amount of references and callbacks to previous moments from the franchise’s history. Think the mini Stay Puft marshmallow men in Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Frozen Empire, or the reuse of famous quotes in Alien: Romulus, not to mention the fact that Star Wars is now just a big Easter egg hunt that only references itself. But why are they like this?

Well, for a start, it’s partly to do with the way Hollywood likes to play things nowadays. In the past, they would take risks on untested new ideas, allowing talented creators to make some pretty amazing movies. They weren’t always successful, but they managed to find a balance between profit and artistic integrity. Now, they are far more risk-averse. Looking at a release slate for 2024 movies earlier this year, it was nothing but sequels, prequels, and spin-offs: Gladiator II, Deadpool & Wolverine, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, Godzilla X Kong. Barely a single original idea was given a real shot.

In contrast, the list of movies released forty years ago, in 1984, was a very different picture. Popular franchises like Terminator, Ghostbusters, and The Karate Kid got their first start in this year, and are still going (for better or worse) four decades later. Has there been a breakout franchise in 2024 that will still be able to boast this? I doubt it.

This reliance on established franchises can be looked at two ways. Cinema doesn’t hold the appeal it once did. Home entertainment’s improved, and the choice of what to watch has expanded, with competition from streaming services, while studios continue to hurt themselves by throwing movies onto their own streaming platforms instead of giving them theatrical releases, or pulling them from cinemas early if they underperform. Why go to the trouble of visiting the cinema when there’s so much on offer in the comfort of your own home?

Then there’s the fact that sequels are a safer bet than starting out with a completely new and original idea, especially as the budgets for large moves have gotten out of control. No one’s willing to risk $200 million on the next Star Wars.

Having a pre-established fanbase ready and waiting to watch your movie is less of a risk than having to get people excited about something new. The problem is that this stops anything fresh coming to the fore and really taking people by surprise. This is further confounded by the way studios approach movie making now, with executives and producers taking a bigger hand in what gets made and how it gets made, stifling creative freedom and leaving little room for the next generation of filmmakers with the same vision as Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.

Hoping to minimize risk, the studio just rolls out another entry from a legacy franchise, but this is not a certain win. Fandoms are quite forgiving, but in the past ten years or so, many have fallen out with the studios that control their favourite franchises, as many poor-quality reboots and sequels have taken apart the things they love. Look at the way Luke Skywalker is treated in The Last Jedi, or Tolkien’s world in The Rings of Power. Such bad faith entries have turned fans away, and made them suspicious of certain studios who want to keep making more out of these IPs.

One response to this by the studios is to try and reach out to fans with movies and TV shows that are as inoffensive as possible. These often lack much originality, relying on established characters, callbacks, and the power of nostalgia to make their audiences happy. Not only are they a symbol of a studio that’s messed up, but also of a franchise that’s running out of ideas. There are two recent movies that can illustrate this for me.

The first is Ghostbusters: Afterlife, released in 2021. The movie is as easy on its audience as possible. It came out a few years after the mess of Ghostbusters 3, which had been a disaster when it came out, almost destroying the franchise. Off the back of this, Sony, decided to take it easy with the next movie in an attempt to win back fans, taking no creative risks, and treating the original characters with respect, especially the death of Harold Ramis who played Egon Spengler.

I liked Afterlife for what it is, but what it is is a nostalgia-heavy film with so many references to the first two movies. What’s more, its sequel, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, continues this trend, failing to cut its own path, and relying entirely upon the fact that it was a Ghostbusters movie to get people watching, rather than also being an entertaining movie in its own right.

The second movie is 2022’s Jurassic World: Dominion. After a hugely successful reboot in 2015, and a less-than-great sequel in 2018, the Jurassic franchise was starting to look tired. The idea of dinosaurs running around eating people has been done to death by B-movies, and these films were embracing Monsterverse pseudo-science more and more. What choice was left for them but to go with the nostalgia angle?

Unlike Ghostbusters, there was no need to appeases the fans, who were still invested in this franchise, the decision to bring back Alan Grant, Eliie Sattler and Ian Malcolm was more about giving a generic Jurassic World movie a unique selling point, bringing back characters who hadn’t been seen for decades. Unfortunately, they weren’t the centre of the movie, as they had to compete with the new heroes like Owen Grady and Claire Dearing, but at least they were not deconstructed in any way, by making Alan into a failed alcoholic. It was pure nostalgia for its own sake, and considering that Dominion managed to bring in $1 billion, it seemed to work. The problem is where can the franchise go now? There’s another JW movie scheduled for release next year, but it feels like this property has fired all of its shots long ago, leaving little point in a seventh entry.

As these two examples show, nostalgia can be a good selling point, but it also means that these movies don’t have much to recommend them outside of it. They might be enjoyable enough, and certainly not damaging to the franchise, but they don’t blow you away either.

So, how should franchises use nostalgia and callbacks?

That depends to some extent on why it’s included in the first place. When I see a Terminator movie or show, I want to hear someone say “I’ll be back”. When franchises have been going on for so long, they pick up little things that fans are waiting for, like how Star Wars always includes the line “I’ve got a bad feeling about this”, or the way Lethal Weapon’s Riggs and Murtaugh do their “on three” routine. If they weren’t there, it would be disappointing. The problem is when this is the only thing that a movie can do to get a response from its audience. I can remember several scenes and lines from Frozen Empire, but none of them are original in their own right. The first Ghostbusters movie, on the other hand, has many moments unique to that film.

Often by the fifth or sixth entry, a franchise simply starts to reference (or even parody) itself, hitting all the beats they think fans want, constantly calling back to earlier entries. It’s rather like a Build A Sequel workshop, where pieces from all the other entries are sewn together to make something that’s derivative of everything else. All the pieces are there, but there’s nothing unique about it.

This might seem like it’s only a small concern, but I think it leads to deeper problems. For one, it will relegate these franchise to history at some point in the future, when no one is around who remembers seeing the original when it came out.

These sequels will become irrelevant if no one knows what they are calling back to, and not only that, but where will the new audience come from? Would anyone who didn’t know the original Ghostbusters care about Frozen Empire? Would it inspire them to go check it out? Or is it just something caught in its own franchise loop?

Fan service can make sense, and there’s nothing wrong with it. It would seem the better option rather than a franchise completely ignoring its fanbase to try and find a new audience. But in order to live on, these IPs need to keep bringing in more viewers. They need to do the impossible of pleasing their existing fans while also opening up to new fans.

If that can’t be done, then perhaps it’s time for these franchises to come to an end, to leave the originals unspoilt for fans to enjoy, and for studios to do that thing they have become terrified of, but which they will need to do sooner or later to survive: create something new.

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