Then there’s the situation in which hype causes films to actually damage their own selves. Here, the initial uber-popularity sets up terrifyingly high standards for any sequels, which then become their own undoing as they simply cannot compete with their own reputation. An obvious example of this is The Hangover franchise.
It all began in 2009 with a fun-sounding premise and a not-yet-reached-superstardom-cast. What was expected on this basis was not a great deal – an American buddy comedy of the older teen kind perhaps, preceded by formulas such as Road Trip and the like. What we actually got was something close to a game-changer for that genre, a well delivered comedy with a genuinely natural feel that gifted us with wonderful cult-status things such as Mr. Chow and waking up the morning after the night before and thoroughly imagining there to be a tiger in the bathroom. Much of the world fell in love with The Hangover.
For the second outing then, there were a lot of expectations. But although reviews weren’t entirely terrible, it only really managed to deliver on the basis of the audience’s affection for the four idiots and their skill for losing people and for forgetting where they are. This left the third film having to do something completely different, which it did by taking a sudden plunge into stark reality. Mental illness, parental death, kidnapping and murder all featured among the main plot points and the feel of the film was entirely altered. The first fifteen minutes of The Hangover Part III is, compared to its predecessors, actually quite sad. No longer was this time spent in the company of the four people we’d secretly most like to go out on the lash with. This was something that any other number of films could give us and that by watching The Hangovers we were deliberately trying to avoid. This was something like real life. Expectations = effectively destroyed.
At least The Hangover understood when to call time. The Pirates of the Caribbean series, which suffered a similar sort of downward spiral of self-destruction after the major success of The Curse of the Black Pearl, was apparently out of the office the day that memo came round. By the time the third Hangover film was in production, there were admittedly some questions as to quite where this could be going this time, but it had been made clear that this was to be the final instalment and on that basis, most fans of the first film were generally prepared to see it through to the end.
The third film in the Pirates franchise, At World’s End, pushed audience loyalty to the brink. But instead of quitting while they weren’t so far behind, they went promptly – and somewhat bravely – on to make On Stranger Tides. Yet we can’t ignore the box office figures for these films; they claim decent or even top positions in the lists of highest grossing films and franchises etc. And whereas the fifth film may still be waiting for the official green light, it is very much in the pipeline. The main reason? Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow becoming an overnight sensation back in 2003, providing the perfect wave on which the Pirates ship would ride for at least the next eleven years, come hell or high water.
Let’s hope Disney wrote hype a nice thank you letter.
