Scream, No Way Home, Matrix Resurrections & The Rise Of The Self-Aware Sequel
Warning: This article contains spoilers for Scream, Spider-Man: No Way Home, and The Matrix Resurrections.
Franchises have been the dominant force in Hollywood for a couple of decades now. Original stories are fading into obscurity as audiences find comfort in familiar characters and serialized narratives. Traditionally, sequels tell a new story about the same characters while trying to recapture what worked in the first one. The earliest franchises from the 1960s, like James Bond and Planet of the Apes, were straightforward episodic adventures.
That all changed with 1980's The Empire Strikes Back, George Lucas’ follow-up to Star Wars, one of the first major Hollywood sequels that required audiences to be familiar with the previous movie. If audiences weren’t familiar with the original Star Wars film (which wasn’t much of a gamble, since it was by far the biggest movie in the world), they wouldn’t be able to follow Empire’s plot turns. As linear sagas like Star Wars have given way to shared cinematic universes like the MCU, studios have relied more and more on the audience’s familiarity with their intellectual properties.
RELATED: Star Wars: The Last Jedi Had A Perfect Sequel Setup (And Rise Of Skywalker Ignored It)
With the big studio tentpoles of this past winter season, Hollywood has defined an all-new kind of sequel. Over the past couple of months, Scream, The Matrix Resurrections, and Spider-Man: No Way Home have all used the legacy of their own franchises as a major plot point. Five years after Deadpool made meta-ness cool, self-aware sequels like the fourth Matrix movie, the fifth Scream movie, and the third movie of the third version of the Spider-Man franchise were inevitable. As long as the audience is
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