10 Things We Learned About Cinema In 2017
4. The Cinematic Universe Concept Is Dying
2017 may be remembered as the year that Hollywood finally gave up on the cinematic universe.
In the wake of Marvel Studios' ascendance from unproven upstart to highest-grossing franchise in history, their rivals scrambled to cobble together cinematic universes of their own at incredible speed, forgetting that Marvel had spent years laying the groundwork for their expansion in order to gradually build an audience with genuine investment in the characters.
Unsurprisingly, most of these attempts failed as the studios focused on building a shared universe from the ground up in the space of one movie and dropping hints about what will happen in the future, instead of focusing on telling a good story and getting people interested in the movie they were currently watching.
With Bill Condon's Bride of Frankenstein being shut down during pre-production, Alex Kurtzman and Chris Morgan departing and the vitriolic critical response to The Mummy, the Dark Universe seems to be over already, marking Universal's second failure to reboot their iconic monsters in just three years after Dracula Untold.
Both King Arthur and Power Rangers were touted as introductions into a wider mythology, but poor box office returns showed that nobody really cared. The shine is even coming off the Lego universe, with last year's Batman and Ninjago combined earning less than The Lego Movie.
Over at DC, Wonder Woman was a triumph but Justice League disappointed both critically and commercially and hasn't even made as much money as Man of Steel yet, with the entire future of the DCEU up in the air due to recent executive reshuffling.
Obviously there is one studio that knows how to make a cinematic universe thrive, and their parent company just happens to have recently purchased the rights to the X-Men...