1) The Movie Landscape Might Be Changing
By all accounts, it’s been a bad financial year for franchise movies. Comedy and animated sequels failing to match their predecessors, major sagas petering out at the box office, and even movies from big-hitters like the X-Men and Terminator series under-performing. It’s laid out in more detail in this piece by The Playlist’s Oliver Lyttelton, but to summarize what all this bad box office means: Hollywood may soon start getting cold feet regarding franchise movies after a year like this.
Every few years the system takes stock and completely changes direction. Where once westerns and musicals were all the rage, the past few years it’s been big-budget franchise movies of the fantasy/sci-fi variety. Only now, it appears audiences are losing interest in those. Even if Warcraft: The Beginning manages to do relatively well at the box office – which unlikely at this point – it might be that any proposed sequels end up falling by the wayside, victims to the changing blockbuster landscape.