Do any of you get excited about prequels? I'm not sure you should. I enjoyed "The Hobbit" (unlike a lot of other reviewers, it seems) but I was constantly aware of things that I knew would (and did) polarize other viewers of the emergent trilogy. And really, "The Hobbit" technically had an inbuilt advantage: It was already written by Tolkien, and uniquely was produced prior to "The Lord of The Rings" trilogy - It's only a prequel by cinematic technicality. Nonetheless, it still falls victim to some phenomena I note here. Those being the case that prequels have so much stacked against them that it renders a satisfactory result almost impossible. Note that I say ALMOST impossible. It's really down partially to the fact that a BLOCKBUSTER sequel is balancing things that have to change to start with....and a franchise usually doesn't weather change well as far as a wide audience is concerned. In marketing terms, OF COURSE you want to put things in your prequel to please fans.....even if it doesn't make any sense in story terms. And really, in story terms, prequels can only work when there IS a story worth telling prior to the one audiences embraced. Would anyone watch Doc Brown and Marty McFly tinker in a garage together despite their age gap? Or see Neo go to work day-in and day-out in his false reality? Well, with "The Matrix", some will say "OF COURSE I want to see what happened with the machines! It'd be better than 'The Matrix: Revolutions'!". Well, tell that to a studio that would've needed to get the public interested in a Matrix movie without Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, and Carrie Anne Moss. Make all the Reeves jokes you want, but that's part of the reason you got two SEQUELS, and no PREQUELS. (Despite the Wachowskis' original plans) So it's no surprise that films that usually have a successful flashback element ("The Godfather Pt II" or "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade", for example) do their looking back in a smaller context. Or, perhaps the most successful prequel, "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" (Look it up - it's set earlier than the previous two films) just sets out to tell a different story slightly earlier in its characters' timeline. In fact, I can't fault "Ugly" at all - It's a solid film in its own right - Which most prequels can't claim; they usually not only depend on their source material, but retroactively tarnish it too. The vast majority of prequels aim very high or purport to start over, but only in execution find that continuing by going backwards creates more conflict than any time-travel film ever has. And it seems we're the ones that get to suffer the results. So here's 10 reasons these films will always have an uphill struggle, and only ruin our memories of the original source in most cases. And it's important to note that:
1. Reboots are off-limits, for obvious reasons. And for the most part I'm not counting JJ Abrams' Star Trek, as that film finds a solid technicality for being a not-prequel by having a parallel timeline (Mostly - the Spock conundrum will be addressed...).
2. I said BLOCKBUSTER prequels for a reason. There's so much direct-to-video dross that claim to be followups set prior to successful films that picking on those would be entirely unfair; They often don't have the budget or resources to even start to compete with their parent films. That said, on the flip side of the coin, the direct-to-video films that DO turn out well ( Er, "Ginger Snaps Back" is the only one coming to mind right now) don't have the expectations or pressure a studio exacts that hinder larger scale productions. So either way, not fair.