3. Awesome - Big Picture Thinking/Long Term Planning
As you may have noticed, there are flipsides to several trends, and this is the flipside to Adapting Every YA Series That's Remotely Popular. As mentioned in that entry, Harry Potter was hugely successful - the most successful franchise in history to be exact - but in the rush to find the next Harry Potter, studios clearly forgot one thing - the books were HUGE, like, bigger than Hagrid and Grawp huge. The series was also at the height of its popularity, and still rising (not to mention, Jo Rowling is a damn good author, unlike Stephanie Meyer.) That was the main reason Potter was so successful: the studios tapped into the zeitgeist, and read the pulse of the public - who were clamoring for a movie adaptation. Plus, the book series was only four entries in when the first movie came out, so the energy and excitement were easily sustainable for the entire film run, while readers eagerly awaited volumes 5 through 7. Chronicles of Narnia, Golden Compass, etc, were all done publishing new installments by the time their films were made, and thus the excitement wasn't there, like it was with Harry Potter, though the obvious exception to this rule, but still an example of big picture thinking is the Lord of the Rings trilogy. None of the other attempts at reproducing Potter's success have had the same set-up - the closest attempt has been widely derided critically, but commercially lucrative: Twilight. The first movie came out the same year as the final book, and since the movie and books were all critically panned, there was no way to sustain or even attain the heights of Harry Potter. Twi-hards' taste not withstanding, their wallets and visible crazy fandom were the only reasons Summit continued with the other 3 books, because they certainly weren't in it for the critical accolades. For further evidence of how awesome "Big picture planning" can be, look no further than Marvel's Phase One. While a completely different beast than Harry Potter, Marvel was nonetheless able to capitalize on the popularity of superhero/comic book movies and deliver the goods, film after film (even Iron Man 2, which greatly improves when watching the entire Phase One, and taking it as one piece of work.) The biggest difference between Marvel's Phase One and Harry Potter, was also Marvel's greatest asset: source material. While Potter was a very specific universe, with a very specific story to tell, Marvel's movies are based on comics that have been around for decades, giving them endless choices for stories to tell. However, without the installments of The Avengers 1, 2 & 3, I feel this experiment wouldn't be as successful, or as satisfying. They need those installments to tie all the separate sub-franchises together. The fact that the entire Phase Two has already been given release dates, and Ant-Man was announced as the first movie in Phase Three, I'd say Marvel has a good thing going.