[COLUMN] The Problem With Prequels | by Darren Mooney

In May 1984, Vincent Canby was reviewing Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom for The New York Times. The movie occupied a strange place in the continuity of the larger franchise. Although it was the second film to be released in the Indiana Jones series, it was not a sequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark. Indeed, the events of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom were set before those of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Looking for a term to describe this sort of follow-up, Canby landed on “pre-sequel.”

Modern audiences would recognize Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom as a prequel. However, that term had not entered the popular consciousness by 1984. The word went mainstream following the release of The Phantom Menace in May 1999, which critic Peter Bradshaw described as “the biggest and most prestigious prequel in commercial cinema history.” This had a huge impact on the industry, with The Guardian declaring in November 2000 that “prequels are the new sequels.”

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first recorded use of the word in print was in Publisher’s Weekly during the 1920s. Christopher Tolkien claims his father conjured “the highly uncharacteristic word” to describe the relationship between The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. Still, its popularity is a modern invention. Google’s ngram search shows an increase in the use of the term since the 1970s, but with a particularly dramatic increase during the early 2010s.

Indeed, modern popular culture is lousy with prequels. Virtually every major modern blockbuster franchise has invested heavily in prequel movies and series. The Fast and Furious franchise followed Tokyo Drift with three movies that were subsequently revealed to be prequels. The two Transformers films following The Last Knight were both prequels to the series. Even the Die Hard franchise has a long-gestating prequel intended to showcase the “origin story” of John McClane (Bruce Willis).

Fox’s X-Men trilogy begat a series of X-Men prequel movies beginning with First Class and a separate prequel focused on the character of Logan (Hugh Jackman), X-Men: Origins – Wolverine. Every Alien movie since the release of Alien Resurrection in 1997 has been set earlier in the franchise timeline. Game of Thrones spawned House of the Dragon. Even decades-old properties weren’t safe. 35 years after The Dark Crystal was released, it received a prequel streaming series, Age of Resistance.

To a certain extent, this emphasis on prequels is perhaps an inevitable result of the larger emphasis on franchises. After all, the term “franchise reboot” has become similarly ubiquitous, which is effectively a prequel or a remake freed from the boundaries of existing continuity and lore. In May 2005, the term “reboot” was still so novel in the context of filmmaking that David S. Goyer had to explain the term to The Los Angeles Times when employing it in discussions of Batman Begins.

However, what is so interesting about the concept of a prequel – particularly in modern pop culture – is the extent to which it has become the default mode of franchising for a certain kind of intellectual property. There is a certain kind of franchise that is particularly drawn to the idea of a prequel. These franchises tend to be science-fiction or fantasy stories that are epic in scope and have reached a critical mass of continuity.

Star Wars might be the most obvious example. By volume, there has been significantly more Star Wars film and television media produced in the past five years than in the previous forty. However, since the release of The Rise of Skywalker in December 2019, all of that media has looked backwards, inserted into various gaps in pre-existing continuity. The next theatrical Star Wars movie, The Mandalorian and Grogu, will take place between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens.

Of course, there are plans for a new movie focusing on Rey (Daisy Ridley) in the wake of The Rise of Skywalker, but that project seems to be very slow in getting off the ground. In May 2024, Ridley assured an interviewer that while she had yet to see a script, it was promised to arrive “soon.” Meanwhile, the more recent Star Wars television show was The Acolyte, set about a century before The Phantom Menace and ending on a tease of Darth Plagueis the Wise.

Recently, both Amazon and Warner Bros. have turned The Lord of the Rings into a franchise. Amazon released The Rings of Power, the most expensive television show ever made, set five millennia before The Lord of the Rings. Later this year, Warner Bros. will release The War of the Rohirrim, set 183 years before the events of The Lord of the Rings. Andy Serkis is also directing The Hunt for Gollum for the studio, a two-part story set between the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings trilogies.

Then there is the Star Trek franchise. When Gene Roddenberry revived the Star Trek franchise for television in 1987, he made sure that The Next Generation jumped roughly one century into the future of the fictional universe. He did this to ensure that the production team working on the show would have the creative freedom to make the Star Trek universe their own, to reimagine existing species and alliances and introduce their own fresh ideas.

The Next Generation spawned two spin-offs: Deep Space Nine and Voyager. When it ended in 2001, the final episode of Voyager offered glimpses of the future year 2404. This seems to exist as a hard boundary on the Star Trek timeline. Producer Rick Berman followed Voyager with Enterprise, a prequel series. This was followed by a trilogy of reboot movies, loosely reimagining the characters from the original Star Trek.

Of the five Star Trek series native to streaming – Discovery, Picard, Lower Decks, Strange New Worlds and Prodigy – only Discovery has pushed itself further into the future than the final episode of Voyager. Even then, Discovery premiered as a prequel to the original Star Trek show, depicting the Klingon War that served as the back story to “Errand of Mercy”, an episode of television that aired in March 1967. Strange New Worlds is an entire show spinning out of an unaired pilot from 1964.

To be clear, prequels are not inherently bad. Better Call Saul was a prequel series to Breaking Bad that managed to extract genuine pathos and tragedy from the audience’s foreknowledge of the ending. Better Call Saul can make a credible claim to being one of the best television dramas in recent years. Andor is handily the best Star Wars media in the past six years or so, and it is a prequel to Rogue One, itself a prequel to the original Star Wars.

However, allowing for these exceptions, it is very hard to mine dramatic stakes and suspense within the confines of a prequel, when the audience already knows the outcome. More than that, there’s also the simple fact that most stories start where they are supposed to start. Anything before that point is, by its nature, superfluous and unimportant to the original narrative. Otherwise, those threads would have been part of the story that was told the first time around.

The structure of a prequel tends to deny resolution, closure or satisfaction. Obi-Wan Kenobi (Alec Guinness, Ewan McGregor) is supposed to be at his lowest ebb at the start of Star Wars, so there’s no way for the prequel streaming series Obi-Wan Kenobi to offer the “hopeful, uplifting” ending that Disney clearly wanted. Any dramatically satisfying conclusion to Obi-Wan Kenobi would force fans to watch their hero fail spectacularly and retreat into disillusionment so he could succeed in Star Wars. The Rings of Power is a show about watching characters fail to kill Sauron (Charlie Vickers).

Of course, it is also worth acknowledging that nostalgia was always a factor in pop culture; such nostalgia moves in cycles. However, the expression of that nostalgia has shifted in recent years. In the past, nostalgia for bygone eras tended to manifest in stories set during those eras. During the 1990s, nostalgia for the 1950s found expression through stories either set during or evoking the pop culture of that period, rather than through the literal resurrection of 1950s pop culture.

As such, it is strange that the prequel has become such a prominent mode of extending existing franchises. To be fair, there are plausible explanations for this. J.R.R. Tolkien gave The Lord of the Rings a pretty definitive ending, so there’s not really much room for stories to be told past that point. Then again, the counterpoint to that argument would be that maybe not everything needs to be a mass media franchise, and it’s okay for some stories to be finite.

In a broader sense, this modern preoccupation with prequels might acknowledge the limits of the franchise age. Prequels might be more palatable than sequels to some studios because a prequel has the luxury of leaving the original ending intact. After all, any sequel to a beloved work requires upsetting or undermining the promise of “happily ever after”, reintroducing conflicts and the threat of failure into the lives of beloved and existing characters. Prequels sidestep that potential issue.

This would be a cynical and cowardly approach to storytelling, but it fits in the broader context of contemporary pop culture. In many cases, modern fandom demonstrates a reluctance to move past iconic and beloved characters, and so prequels offer the promise of more content featuring those beloved characters at their most iconic. Digital technology makes it easier than ever to conjure a simulacrum of Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) as he was nearly half a century ago.

Recognition becomes an end unto itself. Jon Favreau has boasted that his script for The Mandalorian and Grogu “rewards people who have been with the [franchise] since the beginning.” NBCUniversal Content Chief Donna Langley recently talked about the importance of “familiar surprise”, the need to lure audiences to media through brand recognition while offering something vaguely new. Increasingly, it seems like “familiar” trumps “surprise.”

In this sense, these mega-franchises have become a sort of cultural Neverland. This was perhaps inevitable. Certain kinds of fans are prone to insist that intrusion of modernity into their beloved franchises has “ruined their childhood.” Peter Graham famously argued that the golden age of science-fiction is “twelve.” It can often seem like fans don’t want continuations of the stories that they loved when they were twelve, they simply want the experience of being twelve again.

This is why some fans insist with a straight face that Star Wars was “never political”, even though it was always political. These fans don’t want to revisit Star Wars as it existed when they were kids, they want to recreate the experience of watching Star Wars as children. Ultimately, these fans wish to be unburdened of their own knowledge of context. It’s an understandable impulse, especially in these complicated and chaotic times, but it is not within the power of media to do that.

That said, these franchises can certainly try. Recent family movies like Greta Gerwig’s Barbie or John Krasinski’s IF are consciously stories about how adults don’t ever have to give up what they loved as children. In Barbie, the movie’s central twist is that Barbie (Margot Robbie) doesn’t belong to teenage Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), but to her 40-something mother Gloria (America Ferrera). In IF, Bea (Cailey Fleming) helped reconnect forgotten imaginary friends with their now-adult play pals.

Looking at the state of modern pop culture, it’s hard not to remember the old proverb that it’s impossible to step in the same river twice. Modern pop culture seems to insist that it can, even if it has to dam the river and let the water go stagnant.