The year of endings

Given that 2019 is the last year of the 2010s, it seems only natural that we’d be thinking about endings.

What doesn’t necessarily follow, though, is that so many popular franchises would have been geared toward a natural 2019 endpoint in their own chronologies.

No popular cultural commodity can be packed away for good, so in many cases, what we’re talking about here is a pause in the action. But it’s a big pause with a big symbolic value, even if it ends up proving to be a short one.

That this should coincide with the end of a decade is, to be certain, a coincidence. It must be. No franchise starts with the idea of wrapping it up by a certain symbolic date, if only because most franchises can’t be sure they will endure long enough to get there. The point it starts is entirely a function of when its perceived viability has reached a critical threshold in order to make it into a film (or a TV show, as we shall see). The point it finishes, then, is usually a function of x number of consecutive production schedules until the entirety of the story has been told.

For whatever reason, that entirety really descended on us in 2019.

SOME SPOILERS, TREAD CAREFULLY

Let’s look at the examples:

Star Wars – This is the big one, as a story dating back 42 years, with many of the same actors, finally reached its conclusion in 2019. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is not, of course, the last Star Wars movie we will ever see. In fact, it’s almost certain that 20 years from now, we’ll already have as many more Star Wars movies as we’ve gotten in the last 42. But as the end of the Skywalker saga, or at least the end of the actual Skywalker bloodline, it’s a pretty big deal. Sure, Daisy Ridley may say now that she’s done with Star Wars, but I also read that she went and cried alone in her car after seeing the final cut. Emotionally, she’s susceptible to returning, and she adopted the name Skywalker after all. But there’s no doubt that for now, this is an ending, and it’s a big one.

Avengers – It’s hard to feel like a saga has come to an end when a new movie featuring some of the same characters comes out scarcely two months later. But there’s no arguing that Avengers: Endgame represented a real culmination of 11 years’ worth of movies that had preceded it, and that you definitively draw a line when you halve the total of six original Avengers in one fell swoop. Of course, in the perfect example of pop culture’s perennial self-rejuvenation, one of the deceased Avengers is actually getting her own movie just a couple short months from now, albeit a prequel (or so it would seem). Still, to measure just how much of an effect the MCU has had on us, many of us (myself included?) were sadder to see the end of this story than the end of Star Wars. And walking out of that theater back in April, it sure did feel like an ending.

Game of Thrones – Apologies if I switch to TV on a film blog, but GOT is one of the most cinematic TV shows we’ve ever gotten, and in the past decade, its cultural cachet came to rival the two mentioned above and the likes of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. That too came to an end in 2019, though I’m sure we’ll get The Further Adventures of Tyrion Lannister at some point in the next decade. The final season of Game of Thrones was heavily criticized in certain corners of the internet, as well as off it, as you didn’t have to be a geek to get involved in this epic of swords and dragons, breasts and beheadings. For me, the final season flashed moments of brilliance and moments of great disappointment, though more disappointment in the way our heroes can let us down than the way the writers botched the job of telling their story. And for me, it was another sentimental end to a saga I’d been living with for years.

Breaking Bad – While we're on TV ... Breaking Bad should have ended years ago, but since Vince Gilligan decided we needed a conclusion to the story of Jesse Pinkman, we got a movie that did that in 2019. Although the movie was received well in most circles (though not this circle), I suspect Gilligan won't decide he needs to wrap up any more characters, making this the final chapter in the story of these characters, in any case. Unless he gets the bad idea for Breaking Bad: Alaska, which, I hope not. 

Toy Story – So if Toy Story 3 wasn’t really the end, then Toy Story 4 surely is, isn’t it? Never say never, but for now, it does seem like Pixar is ready to move on from the story of Buzz, Woody, Bo Peep et al, delivering the final installment of their story in 2019. There’s nothing that states this has to be the end, except for the perceived catcalls of Pixar fans who thought a fourth movie was already a bridge too far. But at the very least, it’ll be hard to imagine how Woody will reunite with the legacy of Andy and his family friends, represented most distinctly by the gaggle of toys who do remain together at the end of this one.

X-Men – Not all conclusions had a sentimental quality to them. Given the general response of sheer exhaustion and disinterest by fans, they didn’t want to let the door hit X-Men on the ass on its way out. Dark Phoenix was always envisioned as the end point to this particular iteration of the X-Men franchise, but after the way the last two films were resoundingly rejected, it could be a stake to the heart of the franchise on the whole. If so, it’ll leave a bad taste.

It – Okay, so the first chapter of It was only two years ago. But this is definitely the last chapter, unless someone wants to pull some silly stunt like getting these actors together again in three decades, Before Sunrise style, to have them fight Pennywise as 70-year-olds. I include it here more for the way the poster added to the symbolic trend I’m exploring today. The tagline reads simply: “It ends.”

How to Train Your Dragon – Okay, I didn’t even see The Hidden World, which came out in early January in Australia (I was invited to a preview screening in 2018, as a matter of fact). I guess I tired of seeing these movies before they tired of making them. However, they have now tired of that, as producer Dean DeBlois confirmed they don’t intend to make any more. Right, and Sylvester Stallone didn’t intend to make any more Rocky movies after Rocky IV.

Rambo – Another one I didn’t see, but since the aforementioned Sylvester Stallone is now 73, it’s reasonable to believe the promise implicit in the title Last Blood. And since I didn’t see it, I have no idea if Last Blood puts a definitive ending to the story of John Rambo. But whether it does or not, this is actually a pretty big one, as the character has cinematic origins older than any other character on this list save Luke Skywalker.

And this is to say nothing of the franchises that may have practically ended due to poor box office, whether they intended to or not (Terminator, Charlie’s Angels), and the movies that felt like they were career summations based on the age of the director (The Irishman, Pain and Glory).

So yeah, it seems that 2019 was a year for us to look back on the past and kill it, to quote Rian Johnson’s version of Kylo Ren.

But 2020 is not only the start of a new year, it’s the start of a new decade. It seems likely that we’ll get more recycling of franchises that haven’t yet worn out their welcome. But don’t forget that when the last decade started, most of us hadn’t even heard of Game of Thrones or How to Train Your Dragon, and the MCU was in its comparative infancy at only two years old.

Ten years from now, we might be mourning the endings of things we haven’t yet imagined.

What every X-Men movie is about

One of the more shocking franchise developments of 2019 is how hard X-Men crashed and burned. The latest installment, Dark Phoenix, which I saw as my final movie on the flight home on Sunday, made a pitiful $65 million at the box office in the U.S., and barely a quarter of a billion dollars worldwide. That’s nothing these days. It makes it only the 28^th biggest domestic money earner of 2019, but that alone probably does not provide useful perspective. More useful is that means it currently lands between Good Boys and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark in terms of earnings, though both of those are still in theaters and will likely surpass Dark Phoenix. (Good Boys, of course, already has.) By the end of the year it will be no higher than 50th, probably. 

It seems an unthinkable outcome for a series that stars A-listers Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence and James McAvoy, and in this installment boasts A-lister Jessica Chastain, as well as major riser Sophie Turner of Game of Thrones fame. Of course, it’s not even the stars who are specifically supposed to sell a franchise like this, but the brand itself, which has produced nine previous movies – three in the first saga, three so far in this saga, and three Wolverine spinoffs. (Not all of these movies came under the same studio banner, but that hardly matters.)

While watching X-Men: Dark Phoenix, though, I realized why we’ve finally dropped the series: Each movie is about the exact same thing.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think there’s been a single X-Men movie that didn’t involve the uneasy tension between mutants and the world governments that seek to contain them. In each movie, the potential value of a team of superheroes working for good is offset against the potential disaster of their collective destructive force. Each X-Men movie has involved someone proposing to or actually quarantining these X-Men for further research/imprisonment. Each X-Men movie has involved the good X-Men trying to convince the bad X-Men to fight for the greater good rather than their own self-interest and/or survival. And each X-Men movie has dealt with one particularly powerful mutant struggling to control that power while reconciling their anger with their better instincts.

And I think I’ve actually made it sound more interesting than it actually is. Lines of dialogue have become increasingly disposable or interchangeable the more of these movies there have been, as the core conflicts have gotten more and more boring. To give you an idea of the difference between the franchise era we live in now and the one we did 15 years ago, the first X-Men franchise had the good sense, as it were, to end after three movies with X-Men: The Last Stand in 2006, a movie most people did not like. Of course, that ending was humorously short-lived, as the series was rebooted only four years later with X-Men: First Class.

We have now blown past the disliked third movie in this incarnation of the series, 2016’s X-Men: Apocalypse, to deliver a fourth, even less-liked X-Men, Dark Phoenix. The difference is that nowadays you can’t quit when you start to get behind. Maybe they thought focusing on Jean Grey, who had not previously been a part of this saga, would give the series new life, especially as it helped with the modern mandate of replacing the traditionally male protagonists with a clear female protagonist. (Which is one of the reasons Jennifer Lawrence’s Mystique has been so elevated in prominence even though she was a total side character in the original series.) But that thinking ended up being flawed, or at the very least, not enough.

What they should have realized was that if they were going to make a fourth X-Men movie in the current timeline, it had to actually be different in some way. Logan might have been a good example to them. That really deviated from what we knew previously of X-Men with its R rating and with its deaths of two major characters. Perhaps some of Logan did rub off, as Dark Phoenix kills off a major character, though I won’t say who. The fact that this development carries almost no impact shows just how far this series has fallen in the decade since it began with such promise.

X-Men: Dark Phoenix is not an awful movie, but its mediocrity, its reliance on such played out ideas and such familiar tropes, kind of makes it one. Then there are the problems with its execution, like its literal darkness – for some reason they decided to shoot almost all the major set pieces at night. Never a good idea.

I can see how they thought that Dark Phoenix was probably good enough, given its enviable cast and the fact that we’ve been receptive to these ideas in the past. But we will only receive for so long. And now the future for the X-Men franchise seems dark indeed.

Which I’m not mourning. I need a break from X-Men. But if they’d handled it a bit more deftly, maybe I wouldn’t. The best franchises are the ones that you eagerly greet with every new installment, because they are different enough from each other to warrant further exploration. But it feels like there’s really nothing left to explore here, and maybe there never will be.