The best known line of dialogue from Toy Story – the best known line from any Pixar film, in fact – is Buzz Lightyear’s gloriously nonsensical catchphrase, “To infinity – and beyond!” It’s hardly surprising, then, that he says it once every 15 minutes in Lightyear, the new Pixar cartoon which is, supposedly, the sci-fi blockbuster which prompted Andy’s mother to buy him a Buzz action figure back in 1995. What is surprising is that Buzz’s exploits in the film are the exact opposite of what that catchphrase implies. He doesn’t hurtle away to the edge of the universe, let alone beyond it. He spends most of the cartoon stranded on one desolate desert planet, like Matt Damon in The Martian, only with fewer laughs.
The Toy Story series is stranded in a similar sort of way. One of the most touching aspects of the other films is that they show time slipping past. Andy grows up, leaves home, and puts away childish things, whereupon any viewer who’s ever had a child or been a child bursts into tears. Lightyear scraps all of that poignancy and profundity. By retreating to when Andy was six years old, it lets us forget that, by now, he’d probably have kids of his own. But it isn’t just the Toy Story team that’s pressing the rewind button. Everywhere you look, Hollywood’s biggest science-fiction, fantasy and action franchises have stopped exploring uncharted territory, and put themselves into reverse gear.
Instead of another Toy Story film, we have a nostalgic trip back to Andy’s childhood viewing. Instead of another Despicable Me, we have a flashback to Gru’s childhood, too, in next month’s Minions: The Rise of Gru. Instead of a Star Wars episode recounting Rey, Finn, and Poe’s further adventures in a galaxy far, far away, we have several TV series (The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, Obi-Wan Kenobi) set before The Force Awakens. And instead of a film about a middle-aged Harry Potter, we have the Fantastic Beasts spin-offs, which revisit those halcyon days when Dumbledore wore a tweed suit and not a dress. The pop-culture river is full of boats beating on against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Some of these retro films and TV series are straightforward origin stories, such as Joker (2019) and Cruella (2021), but most of them aren’t the same as the creation myths which were all the rage 10 or 15 years ago. The likes of Batman Begins (2005), Casino Royale (2006), Star Trek (2009), and Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) looked backwards, in that they envisaged the earliest escapades of familiar characters. But they also promised to wipe the slate clean, to start afresh, and to forge exciting new continuities in which anything was possible. Today’s biggest film and TV franchises prefer to drift around continuities where most things aren’t possible, because they have to include events we’ve seen or heard about already. We already know who’ll be killed off, and who won’t. We know roughly what’s going to happen. Whatever Ewan McGregor’s Obi-Wan gets up to, we know he’ll be waiting on Tatooine when Luke Skywalker comes knocking.
And just think of the latest Star Trek series. Once upon a time, the whole point of the programme was to boldly go where no one had gone before. That pioneering spirit infuses the sub-title of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which premiered on Paramount+ in May. But the series is set aboard the USS Enterprise as it was depicted in the pilot episode of Star Trek in 1965, which means that it covers the period before James T Kirk took the helm from Christopher Pike (Anson Mount), and when Spock (Ethan Peck) and Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) were still learning the ropes. Other high-profile series are taking the same historical approach. House of the Dragon, set 200 years before Game of Thrones, is due in August; The Rings of Power, set thousands of years before The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, follows in September. And, back on the subject of films, Timothée Chalamet will be playing Willy Wonka in a prequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory which is coming out next year. At last, the secret of how he concocted Whipple-Scrumptious Fudgemallow Delight will be revealed.
All of this is quite a contrast with the forward-looking optimism that such money-spinners had just a few years ago. The Force Awakens, Jurassic World and Creed revived three old franchises in 2015. Man of Steel (2013) and Wonder Woman (2017) saw Warner pushing on with its efforts to form a Marvel-rivalling shared universe for DC’s superheroes. And in 2016, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child opened in London’s Palace theatre, its posters boasting that “the story continues on stage”. Everyone, it seemed, wanted their narratives to keep advancing, with no end in sight. Who knew where they would go? Who knew which twists and turns were on the road ahead?
Today, we’re seeing story after mega-budget story grinding to a halt. The so-called “Skywalker saga” sputtered out with The Rise of Skywalker; the Jurassic World Dominion posters bill it as “the epic conclusion of the Jurassic era”; and No Time to Die brought the James Bond chronicles to a definitive end. OK, so the character is bound to return in some form or other but, for the first time in 60 years, a Bond movie closed with a full stop rather than a comma. Even Marvel’s superhero blockbusters have yet to pick up speed after the grand finale of Avengers: Endgame. Black Widow was set earlier, despite being released two years afterwards, and none of Marvel’s other recent films have been heading anywhere in particular. They’re all just … there. The only franchises with any momentum are the ones that are going backwards.
There are exceptions, admittedly. The Mission: Impossible and the Fast and the Furious franchises are still chugging along, Ghostbusters: Afterlife will be followed by “the next chapter in the Spengler family story”, and, who knows, maybe next year’s Indiana Jones 5 will lead to a spate of octogenarian Indy sequels. But when so many films and TV series are delving into their own fictional history books, there’s no denying that something strange is going on.
The trend certainly suggests that studios have lost confidence – that they’re afraid of upsetting their viewers and damaging their share prices by taking their intellectual property anywhere unexpected. But maybe it’s our own nervousness that’s to blame. There have been countless articles about our urge to rewatch our favourite films and series during lockdown. What we’re getting now is the next best thing – films and series that give us the comforting impression that we’ve seen them before, even when they’re brand new.
I wonder, too, if there’s a despairing pessimism involved in this fixation on the imagined past. Between the invasion of Ukraine, the pandemic, the climate crisis and all the other crises, it can be hard to picture a thrilling, limitless future. It’s easier to reminisce about our younger selves – so why not reminisce about the younger Obi-Wan, Andy, Spock and Dumbledore while we’re at it?
