Every Movie Should Be a Fresh Start

There are many reasons I would die for Detective Pikachu. He is very cute. He has a fuzzy little tail and a wee cap. I still have a Gameboy Color on which I exclusively play * Pokémon Blue* and * Pokémon Red*. The movie looks fun and funny, but also, I am predisposed to being excited for Detective Pikachu because of various demographics. However, the one thing I’m really excited about is that, at least from the trailer, it feels like a movie that came out of nowhere. It appears to have little to do with the Pokémon media that already exist, and just wants to tell a new story using characters we already love.

I’m begging anyone who has a hand in this—more non-canon movies, please.

Many people have already lodged complaints about the franchise-ness of mainstream film, where everything is either in the MCU or a spinoff or remake or prequel. I’m not opposed to telling stories that take place with known characters in established worlds. The problem is not the collective understanding of who everyone is and what the mechanics of the universe are, it’s that everything has to start at the same point and connect back to each other, creating a dense, boring web that makes watching movies a drag.

Part of this involves origin stories. Take Spider-Man. He was created in 1962 in Amazing Fantasy #15, when Queens student Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive spider. We know this. But even if you don’t know this, you can probably guess what someone named Spider-Man’s powers are. And yet, in every rebooted franchise we have to start with half an hour of Peter Parker getting bitten by a spider and learning to swing from the damn buildings.

And part of it is that, once we have an origin story, it sets up a world of characters and references it seems we all have to have in order to enjoy the film, or even just to understand what’s going on. I’m annoyed not that the Fantastic Beasts films failed so terribly in connecting to the Harry Potter timeline, but that they tried in the first place. I’m annoyed by the interconnectivity of the MCU, sure, but also that every Star Wars requires an understanding of the Skywalker family tree when there’s literally an entire universe to tell stories about. I’m annoyed that we can’t seem to unstick these fictional characters and do unique things with them, and instead must tell linear, seven-film stories about them.

Movies should not be TV shows. We have TV for serial storytelling, and movies for two hours of standalone entertainment. This isn’t to say I’m against sequels or franchises, only that at a certain point it becomes untenable. What feels so exciting about Detective Pikachu is that, essentially, it’s fan fiction. Do we know where Pokémon come from? No. We just know there exists a fictional world filled with cute wild animals with weird powers that people like to catch and battle. We can do anything with that. You don’t have to have played video games for 20 years in order to enjoy yourself.

It feels like we’re getting closer to a world in which this is encouraged. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse experiments with the idea of multiple Spider-Beings, and probably assumes you know how a Spider-Person happens. There’s Peter Parker, but there’s also Miles Morales, and Gwen, and a Spider-Pig. But there are so many more opportunities. Make a Red Son movie! Erase Harry Potter’s memory and put him in space! Make the whole Guardians of the Galaxy gang do a western!

This type of film doesn’t always work; our thirst for references and easter eggs can easily turn a non-canon film into chaos. But it’s something I wish major studios would embrace more in their blockbuster action and animated movies. I know that what keeps many of these stories from even being imagined are things like public domain statutes (thanks, Disney) and studio ownership, but I’d rather something weird and experimental than having to remember that Batman is pissy because of something that happened in 2015. We all deserve to be unstuck.