If you have seen John Wick: Chapter 2 – and I can tell from the desensitised look in your eyes that you have – you will know that one scene stands out above all others. It’s the scene in which the baddie orders a hit on Wick and all of a sudden Keanu Reeves is fighting off attacks at every turn. There’s a sumo wrestler. There’s a woman whose violin is also a bazooka or whatever. There’s row after row of visually arresting but disposable goons. It is a diverting sequence, and quite a fun one.
Or at least it was. Because now it has been announced that Wick is getting his own expanded universe, which means that all those godforsaken goons are bound to end up with a film of their own. The first step of the expanded universe will be Ballerina, about a female assassin who has to kill some other assassins. If that goes well, who knows, maybe there will be a film about that sumo guy killing some assassins, then a film about Wick’s new dog killing some assassins, then it will culminate in an Avengers-style denouement where Wick just stands on top of a pile of already-dead assassins for two hours and shrugs.
This is a bad idea. John Wick was an entertaining B-movie, and the sequel proved its worth, but it is not the foundation for a cinematic universe. Making an expanded world from that film is a cynical exercise in riding an already slim idea until the wheels come off. I would call it the low point in the fad for cinematic universes, had that point not already been reached.
We now have the DC universe, which until Wonder Woman consisted of grumpy men scowling in the rain for three hours at a time. Warner Bros also has MonsterVerse, which is dedicated to films in which Godzilla and King Kong hit things. Paramount has set up a writers’ room specifically to churn out ideas for a shared Transformers universe. The plan is to make 12 more films.
Marvel, which had the idea first, is starting to lose steam. The Marvel Cinematic Universe was a brave experiment, but it is being ground down into sludge. Enjoyment of each new film relies on knowledge of what came before, and the movies are being churned out in generic slabs because they need to slot together somewhere down the line. However high your hopes are for Thor 3, the fact that Marvel already has three films locked into the 2020 release calendar should be enough to make your shoulders droop.
If nothing else, the MCU should act as a warning that others – including Universal, with its woeful Dark Universe, and Star Wars – have failed to heed. To make an expanded universe work, you need two things: cheap, young actors who can be locked into unfavourably lengthy contracts and directors you can trust with a bigger picture.
Two films in, Star Wars has already failed on the latter twice, reshooting Gareth Edwards’ original Rogue One and firing Phil Lord and Christopher Miller from the Han Solo movie before it was even in the can. The problems the Dark Universe faces relate to the former. By hiring stars such as Tom Cruise, Russell Crowe, Johnny Depp and (potentially) Angelina Jolie, they have gone for huge actors used to getting their own way creatively. Give them too little leeway and they will abandon ship; give them too much and the pieces won’t fit into the narrative universe.
Sure, times are hard and audiences like established brands, but there are too many expanded universes. Perhaps that’s why Dunkirk has done so well – audiences know they won’t have to sit through a spin-off where Mark Rylance listlessly murders a bunch of assassins. Although that doesn’t sound like such a bad idea.
