THE announcement lighted up the Internet Thursday: Frozen would be getting a sequel. Disney chief Robert Iger unveiled the news at the company’s shareholder meeting, saying that Frozen 2 was indeed a reality for the company.
There was barely any new information—no title or plot line, for instance—and the basic idea of a new film was widely expected. You don’t have a $1.3 billion global grosser these days without making a sequel. Heck, you barely have a $130-million movie without making a sequel.
But the interest in Elsa, Olaf and Co. knows no bounds, and so the enthusiasm was boundless—Frozen 2 was still one of the top trending topics on Twitter Friday a fternoon.
It will be interesting to see how Frozen 2 goes over when it finally comes out, not financially (Disney will be just fine) but culturally. One of the factors that’s made Disney animation movies such a force over the decades is the company’s aversion to sequels.
Just look at Disney sister unit Pixar, which also studiously avoided sequels for many years, nurturing each movie like a newborn and then creating the feeling of a unique event around them—Wall-E and The Incredibles and Ratatouille and Up, all part of a golden age. But Pixar answered the sequel siren call a few years ago with movies like Cars 2 and Monsters, Inc. and the company began to lose a little juice
At the very least, Frozen makes sense—like Pitch Perfect, it’s an original, organic hit that has fans clamoring for more. Fan clamor is not exactly the phrase that characterizes plenty of other sequels these days.
Earlier this week Ivan Reitman and Sony announced a new male-centric Ghostbusters with Channing Tatum and the Russo Bros. This is different from the long-rumored Ghostbusters 3 and not to be confused with the Paul Feig female-centric Ghostbusters movie, and the potential other output of what will be called Ghostcorps. As Reitman told Deadline, “We want to expand the Ghostbusters universe in ways that will include different films, TV shows, merchandise, all things that are part of modern filmed entertainment.”
Ivan Reitman is a talented director, one of the commercial-comedy greats. And the first Ghostbusters is legendary. But is there some unquenched need for Ghostbusters: The Flamethrower, some thronging fan base that hears the phrase “new company dedicated to endless production of Ghostbusters movies” and can’t get enough? If there is, they’re saying less than the Stay-Puft man.
Moviedom these days is filled with news like this—franchises in search for a reason for being (see also under Terminator: Genysis). Because of course the reason for making these movies is not the demands of the story or the fans but the demands of Wall Street.
At the same meeting where he announced (to those Wall Streeters) Frozen 2, Iger was also revealing some dates and details for new Star Wars movies. We knew we were getting a load of Star Wars in the coming years, but it was unclear how exactly they’d be loaded. As it turned out, rather crowdedly. We’ll have a moment to breathe after Star Wars Episode VII hits theaters in December—the movie after that, Gareth Edwards’s standalone Rogue One, won’t hit until December a year later. But after that it will be a scant five months until the next Star Wars movie, Rian Johnson’s Star Wars Episode VIII. And it’s conceivable we’ll see Josh Trank’s Star Wars standalone (it stands alone from the standalone) not long after that.
Star Wars of course is a property fans are clamoring for more of. But that demand is not being met in a single, curated effort a la (for now) Frozen but in a keep-em-coming manner. The question is whether by the time we get to the end of the cycle, will Star Wars feel more like Frozen 2 or the sixth Ghostbusters movie? The issue in Hollywood these days isn’t whether a sequel might get made—it’s what kind of sequel will be made.
Steven Zeitchik / Los Angeles Times