It seems all the trades like Variety, the Hollywood Reporter and Deadline can talk about now is how Dark Phoenix (also known in some parts of the world as X-Men: Dark Phoenix) crashed and burned at the box-office, bringing the Fox Era X-Men films to an ignominious end (assuming they decide not to release The New Mutants).
For me, though, the bigger news is that for two weekends in a row, audiences all around the world have given lukewarm to downright cold receptions to limp sequels to big movies such as Godzilla, The Secret Life of Pets, and the aforementioned X-Men series of films, the last entry of which was the much reviled X-Men: Apocalypse. I detested the first of those two films and was disappointed by the third and in truth of the sequels I was only really interested in watching Dark Phoenix, but only out of a desire to close out the Fox X-Men movie series by watching the last one, and not any real interest in the film itself. I figured, though, that they were all destined to make bundles of money no matter what I thought and therefore perpetuate Hollywood's sequel-churning machine. That was how we managed to get five awful Transformers movies, after all.
It is therefore with utmost gratitude that I address the audiences world over for having decisively told Hollywood, "NO."
To all of you: THANK you. Thank you, at least for the moment, for telling those money-grubbing, cocaine-snorting, IP-plundering, suit-wearing zombies trying to pass themselves off as artists to go fuck themselves. Thank you for teaching them that a sequel isn't worth your time or money unless they do it well, and that if they're going to get your hard-earned currency, they had better earn it.
In particular it is with great satisfaction that I take note of the failure of The Secret Life of Pets 2, because of how much I despised the first installment, which is basically a retread of Toy Story with assholes in the lead roles. Illumination Studios has coasted by for years on sub-par products like the Despicable Me sequels and the Minions spin-off often made for a fraction of the money that the likes of Pixar spend on their films. Illuminatio's devil-may-care attitude towards whether or not their films are actually any good has finally come and bitten them on the ass. Sure, considering how frugal the folks at Illumination are, The Secret Life of Pets 2 is still bound to make money at the global box-office (unlike Godzilla: King of Monsters and Dark Phoenix, whose return on investment is not at all guaranteed), but they've surely gotten the message loud and clear that they can't keep on churning out crap and expect to rake in easy billions. It's also a stern lesson global audiences taught the producers of Transformers two years ago when The Last Knight flopped, which, if nothing else, has at least prompted a re-think among Paramount execs on how to make these movies going forward.
I'm not actually averse to sequels. Heck, I have the Jason Bourne trilogy, all four James Bond movies starring Daniel Craig, Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy, the Toy Story trilogy, the Kung Fu Panda trilogy, and virtually every movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe in my collection. So obviously I don't have any problem with sequels. It just irks me when they are painfully obvious cash grabs, without any real effort on the part of the filmmakers to earn that cash. Perhaps my favorite example of this, outside the godawful Transformers films is 2015's Minions, but suffice it to say there are many, many others, and personally, I'm glad that, at least this year, audiences are repeatedly saying "NO" to lousy sequels. We all deserve better, and I'm glad we're finally realizing it instead of handing over our hard-earned wages to these suits, many of whom who wouldn't know decent filmmaking if it kicked them in the shins.
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