Four’s A Crowd

It’s 2005ish in Hollywood, and a film executive suddenly leaps onto his chair with a winning smile. “Huzzah!” he cries. “I know how we’ll squeeze cash from the public to reupholster this boardroom.”

“Is it some original idea for a blockbuster that will capture the imagination of millions?”

“No!” roars Mr. Executive. “What we’ll do is make an extra sequel for all the successful trilogies. No original thought required and we’ll be able to get ostrich leather armchairs by Christmas!”

Somehow, Shrek Forever After found its way onto our cinema screens last summer. With its vomit-inducing bad tag line (‘it ain’t ogre till it’s ogre’), it essentially constituted a lazy rehash of the last three films. A few half-baked jokes and a bit of snazzy production were thrown in for good measure. Very few people expected anything more, and yet it still grossed a ridiculous $749 million worldwide.

Example number two. The wildly successful Pirates of the Caribbean franchise is limbering up for a fourth instalment to be released in the summer. I find it impossible to comprehend why this is a good thing. Of course, sometimes one film isn’t enough to convey an epic storyline. This is why we have trilogies, and they make sense. There’s a beginning a middle and an end. The Fellowship is formed, the Empire strikes back and you finish up with the Last Crusade. This format was good enough for The Godfather films, but apparently it’s not good enough anymore. There’s not even a word for this new four-part fashion. Does a trilogy become a quadrilogy? That sounds shit.

The worst thing about this trend is that it ruins all the preceding films. The first Pirates of the Caribbean film was incredible, ticking boxes marked  ‘fake cockneys’, ‘zombie pirates’ and ‘Kiera Knightley in a skimpy petticoat’. I watch it now and find its charm diminished – diluted by the fact that all the swagger of Jack Sparrow is spread so thickly over the sequels that his little non-sequitur monologues have become cliché. Each film of the existing trilogy tries to trump the last. By Pirates 3 we have an octopus-faced admiral and Keith Richards in a bad ass frock coat. It’s trippy, yeah, but it doesn’t make a good film. The next one will probably cast Barack Obama as a sea turtle.

The ends of the films are an issue too. Unsure as to whether the film in hand would end up popular enough to warrant a sequel, each of the first three Shrek films concluded in limp compromise. Everyone lives happily ever after and the plot is over. It’s never done in such a way that would obstruct a sequel. No main characters die, no secrets are revealed to shock the audience and twist their perceptions. It’s a smooth, predictable handover. As a quick footnote, this entire diatribe doesn’t apply to Die Hard 4.0 which is immense. Bruce Willis actually blows up a helicopter by launching his car at it.

I might be a bit disgruntled but I’m not blind to the basic facts of the industry. They want money. They know what will get a family of five into a Renault Espace and down to the multiplex. It’s lazy, but it makes sense in the short term. But it’s not sustainable. At some point –  probably on the day that Ice Age 4: Global Warming is released – it’s going to stop working. People will get increasingly bored with the production-line releases. Stars will start demanding more money to denigrate their reputations by phoning in roles they’ve done to death. Thank God.