Franchises that are appropriate for children are inherently limited in scope

I was messaging with a friend of mine on Facebook early this morning. She had gone to a midnight Guardians of the Galaxy 2 showing and was feeling vaguely dissatisfied. She said that she liked it and found it funny and thought it hit all the beats she was looking for, but she still felt like something was missing. For context she’s a huge comic book, sci fi, and fantasy fan, the kind of person who loves franchise movies, for lack of a better term. Her complaints are not unusual, in my experience, among such diehards. The new Star Wars movies, for example, have been described to me by several friends, all of them convention-going megafan types, as very good but kind of hollow. The Marvel Cinematic Universe movies are often described, even by fans, as all feeling kind of the same.

Some people take me for a hater of this kind of entertainment, but I’m not. I certainly don’t take any pleasure in people who love this stuff not feeling as good as they might. But it seems pretty plain to me why this is happening: these franchises are made and marketed to an audience that includes children, and they therefore have to choose from a very limited range of plots and themes.

Of course you’re vaguely dissatisfied and of course everything feels the same; a huge swath of the human experience is preemptively removed from these movies because they have to appeal to, and be appropriate for, an audience that includes children. That’s somewhat an artistic choice but it’s mostly an economic choice — huge tentpole franchise movies need to have the widest possible audience, and so they need to avoid R ratings. That eliminates a lot of plots and themes from the toolkit of a writer. Beyond that, there’s the corporate adherence to preventing offense; again, these movies need to have everyone as a potential audience member, and so you can’t go being too subversive, too polemical, or too challenging.

Some absolutely basic elements of storytelling that are forbidden in big franchise movies include:

• Sex, in almost any form.
• Politics beyond the most banal endorsements of inclusivity or those so abstracted as to be meaningless.
• Violence that emphasizes consequences, suffering, and trauma rather than violence that is badass, funny, balletic, or otherwise enjoyable.
• Religion other than vague mysticism and New Age-y positivity.
• Tragedy, in a real and enduring sense, or stories that otherwise leave the audience feeling sadder or darker when they leave the theater than when they came in the theater.
• Moral and political complexity.
• Thematic or narrative elements that in any other way threaten the likelihood that a majority of audiences and critics will walk out saying “it was a good time.”

Darker emotions and feelings of loss are as fundamental to the human experience as happiness and victory, so art that excises the former will inevitably start to seem stale and played out. And adults tend to be preoccupied by adult ideas. It’s not complicated.

The point’s not about quality. Many works of art that were written for children are masterpieces and rank among my very favorite. But when people look at the entertainment choices available to them and find only that which could be kid tested, mom approved, they will start to feel bored regardless of the quality of those choices. The best children’s art often explores deep themes, and in fact has a way of smuggling in ideas about sex and loss and adulthood without violating the letter of the law. But that’s always the product of subtle choices, and franchise movies can’t do subtlety. They can’t afford to.

None of this strikes me as at all inflammatory. Again, I am making this point in a way that’s 100% quality-agnostic. It’s simply a reflection of the natural constraints that the people who make these movies labor under. Please note that I am not saying that these movies are only for children. I am however saying that they are necessarily also for children. And you’ll note that the rare R-rated superhero film like this year’s Logan are also the ones that are most likely to be described as fresh and engaging.

Balance, obviously, is the key. Diversity of artistic interests is the key. But both the economics of entertainment and the growing sense that there is no such thing as liking something too much agitate against that balance.

In recent years we’ve arrived at an overwhelming cultural consensus against any sort of value judgment against genres and mediums that have traditionally been considered children’s entertainment. The defenders of their quality, and of the legitimacy of adults following them with incredible devotion, have won an unconditional social victory. Nobody wants to be seen as looking down their nose at these franchises, me included. The stuffiest critics now go out of their way to show that they don’t want to be the one to end the party. And yet the spirit of dissatisfaction grows, just as these franchises take over more and more of the economic space of our entertainment industry. What fans of these franchises are finding is that even when you win the war, you don’t end up feeling the way you thought you’d feel. When I watch a Star Wars movie and absorb that universe’s utter, existential sexlessness, or take in a Marvel movie that once again marches its characters through the same old story beats, it’s not hard to imagine why.