The Art Of The Perfect Crossover Movie
6. There Must Be Stakes
It's all well and good bringing two established properties together, but there simply has to be some very real stakes on the table.
Much like any movie, period, the higher the stakes, the more invested an audience can become. And in the case of a crossover, that's a tricky beast to handle - for you want to have serious consequences on the table, yet you maybe don't want to follow through on anything that may have an ill-conceived knock-on effect for either existing property moving forward post-crossover.
Taking Freddy vs. Jason as a prime example, that movie went from the offing of disposable teens, to a battle for supremacy between the film's titular duo where there could be only one man left standing. That man would be Jason Voorhees, with Freddy decapitated.
Still, Freddy vs. Jason ended with a literal wink to the audience that maybe Freddy's demise wasn't quite as final as we were led to believe. But due to the stakes on the line for these two horror icons, fans embraced the battle of these two legendary figures and likewise embraced the fact that only one person could emerge victorious once this crossover was done and dusted.