Movie of the Year: 1991 – State of the Franchise
Movie of the Year: 1991
State of the Franchise
How impactful were 1991 movie franchises?
Hit movie franchises are literally all this country has left. Is that hyperbolic? Let me check. No. No, it isn’t. Everything else is gone. In this vast wasteland, there is only one thing of value left: blockbuster movie franchises. But was it always this way? Scientists have told us the answer, and it is a resounding “nah, not so much.”
In the early nineties, there were film franchises but they they were largely bound by a quantity-or-quality metric where having more than three movies in your franchise was a sign that it was now, or always had been, trash for pig people.
Well, oink oink, because we are jamming our porcine snouts deep into that trough, and we won’t stop eating until we’ve consumed every movie franchise that made 1991 a year to remember.
And what was 1991 if not the 80s persisting? Shoulders were still big, greed was still religion, and Democrats were still Republicans. Nineteen-Eighty-Eleven straddled two times, and so its movies often looked in both directions as well. Although, as we covered in the GenreBlast episode, the future-looking movies of science fiction were awful at this time. With one exception that I need not even mention here but is yes in fact Terminator 2: Judgement day thank you for asking.
Nineteen and ninety-one. It was a magical time full of promise and wonder and we have to go back. However, we cannot. We can only move forward. Because we are podcasters, and bravely moving into the future is all we know how to do. All of that, and somehow more, on an all-new Movie of the Year!
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