The Art Of The Perfect Crossover Movie

Even though so much of this feature has focused on hammering home the point that firmly establishing your key characters and franchises in their own movies is absolutely pivotal to a crossover doing well, there is an exception to this rule.

That exception, of course, is if you opt to use characters steeped in history.

It's not an instant formula for success, but it is doable to hit a home run with doing a one-off movie that serves as a way to bring together certain already established characters. Case in point, something like Fred Dekker's The Monster Squad.

That 1987 picture wasn't the coming together of several previous movies, per se, but it served as an insta-crossover between some of the most famous characters in wider pop culture - in this case, the mythical behemoths of Count Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, the Wolfman, and Gill-Man.

In such a movie, a filmmaker can rely on the audience already having substantial knowledge of the characters and IPs that are being brought together. Even in those instances though, falling back on audiences knowing all about characters, rather than establishing them individually in this universe, isn't always a surefire success.

Which nicely dovetails into...