I wrote this in 2022 and found it recently. Given that times seem only to be more trying, and the prequel firehose has not stopped gushing, it remains pertinent. We’ve seen released since, among others, A Quiet Place Day One, Furiosa, Mufasa, Dune: Prophecy, Alien: Romulus and my most-anticipated upcoming Elle.
Uncertainty permeates the everyday of twenty-first century audiences and looms over the ledgers of movie studios and streaming services. It likely pulls us psychologically and culturally towards prequel stories as a fizzy mix of narratively satisfying and low-risk. Nostalgia also plays a part. This bittersweet longing for the past acts as a buffer to discomforting experiences like loneliness, and prequels offer this emotional salve at multiple levels.
However – while lamenting ‘prequel culture’ as creatively chilling or consistently resulting in inferior works of film or TV sometimes carries a whiff of ‘sellout’ snobbery – it’s fascinating to absorb and apply to it Marco Caracciolo’s sensitive analysis of the opportunities afforded by narrative practices to help audiences, and therefore our communities at large, actively navigate uncertainty about our shared future. Prequels aren’t a bad thing per se, but exploring new stories could offer us something much-needed.
We don’t want what we don’t know
If you were offered the choice between winning $100 if a red ball is chosen from a barrel of fifty red and fifty black balls, or from a barrel where the colour proportion is unknown, what would you choose? An extensive body of research indicates you’re more likely to choose the first option, even when the potential reward for the second is higher and after you’re informed of the theorised reason for your choice: ambiguity aversion.
Ambiguity aversion seems to be a learned human response: we prefer known probabilities to unknown. Uncertainty is one of the most challenging psychological experiences available to us, likely because avoiding it offers protective tendency in evolutionary terms. As humans existing in 2022, uncertainty is our atmosphere. We’re struggling through the gloop of late-pandemic life, climate emergency and political divide – and many of us aren’t coping well.
Similarly, we’re increasingly returning to known quantities via prequel culture. There’s a business reason, of course, as studios merge and rationalise and become ever more reluctant to invest in new, untested intellectual property. Scanning a list of TV and film prequels (for example, in 2022 alone: Prey, Andor, House of the Dragon, The Rings of Power, Lightyear and upcoming Furiosa, Wonka and The Hunger Games prequel) most would be categorised as fantasy, sci-fi or horror – genres generally more expensive to make than contemporary realistic stories. It makes sense that those would also be the established properties that studios return to most often for further collateral. Notable prior exceptions like Better Call Saul, the Breaking Bad prequel, come from wildly popular and critically acclaimed fictional universes.
But prequels also serve a specific psychological and cultural purpose. They provide an opportunity to explore precarity within a meta-narrative of certainty: largely that we know where these prequel stories will ultimately lead, and we know that when the characters don’t.
The ‘unboxing’ video trend that peaked a few years ago had a similar shape:
“Unboxing videos and surprise toys allow kids to enjoy the anticipation without being too afraid, Barr said, because they know roughly what will be in the package, just not the exact details.” - The Atlantic (the emphasis is mine)
Apply that to prequels: we know roughly what will be in the package, just not the exact details.
The good old days were just days ago
Then, beyond aversion to the unknown, it’s no wonder we’re yearning for the chance to make things right through prequel stories. Turning to comforts of the past in times of upheaval is a related and deeply human coping mechanism. It’s a truism now that the social media shorthand of the early Covid-era in many countries became crafting, baking, roller skating. Simple, concrete things we could retreat to as the outside world swirled around us. (Especially if we were observing ‘the jackpot’ from a privileged position tucked somewhere behind the front lines.)
A further significant body of research shows that nostalgia, a sentimental longing for one’s past, acts as a buffer against discomforting psychological states such as loneliness, and that this holds across cultures. Prequels offer in-story nostalgia, as well as that triggered by the people and world we were when the original films and shows were released.
With internet culture providing a fertile landscape for the feedback loop between experience and re-experience, nostalgia cycles were already shortening, as anyone familiar with a teen nostalgically revisiting YouTube videos from only a few years ago will attest. The pandemic further intensified this spiral:
“A more peculiar form of nostalgia is the longing for how things were just before coronavirus turned our lives upside down. This challenges a basic assumption of nostalgia research: that nostalgia is a longing for a past that can no longer be recovered.
Throughout lockdown many were nostalgic not for how things were in the 1990s, or when they were little, but for how things were just a few months ago. … What we are really witnessing is a nostalgia for a past that held the promise of a future.” The Conversation (the emphasis is mine)
The young people playing their part in driving the nostalgia trends have never experienced a world in which there hasn’t been ongoing war, recession, political polarisation, climate crisis and pandemic. Nostalgia plus ambiguity aversion are two of the tools employed to keep those plates spinning. (Yes, a prequel will do nicely.)
How can we make it right?
However, prequel stories are notoriously difficult to execute in a compelling, inventive way. The three main types of prequel are side story, expository and backstory. Less successful prequels often have an element of backstory recharacterisation, especially forcing the antagonist of the original into a more humanised protagonist, like 2021’s Cruella. (Whether or not Joker was successful in that regard depends on who you ask.)
Prey, for example, succeeds by keeping things simple, having the connective thread to the side story of Naru and her eighteenth century Comanche Nation community being the Predator. There’s no character development needed there. Predator likes hunting. That’s the origin story. The universe is the same but all other characters and the setting are entirely different. Prey doesn’t try to re-tell or change the conclusions the audience drew from the original film and others in the franchise, but to build on them: Naru is a skilled and inventive hunter, too, but she is also fallible, courageous, complex and human. Plus, as film critic Vincent Schilling, an Akwesasne Mohawk man, notes, the film’s thoughtful depictions of Comanche culture, language and practices can offer a specifically meaningful experience for Native American viewers.
“For once, as a Native man, I could actually relax and enjoy a film without waiting for the culturally inappropriate bomb to drop.” Vincent Schilling, of Prey
So should we lament the loss of creative originality at the feet of corporate screen philistinism? It’s not the full story. Ambiguity aversion does map to brands, in terms of recognition and loyalty, but rather than looking at this as just another finance guy’s excuse for more Marvel content, it’s interesting to consider the finding that ‘feeling emotionally connected to films is the most effective way for consumers to identify films as brands’ in the first place.
Even those supposed cynical money grabs can make someone feel something. Unexamined criticism of prequel culture sometimes resembles a contempt for ‘pop’ screen artistry that might not hold up to in-depth interrogation.
Narrating uncertainty
Having said that, according to Marco Caracciolo, Associate Professor of English and Literary Theory at Ghent University in Belgium, ‘reading narrative (or engaging with narrative in other media) may train audiences in the acceptance or embrace of ecological uncertainty as a fundamental dimension of the experience of the present.’ His most recent book, Contemporary Fiction and Climate Uncertainty, offers this in relation to climate and environment, as the title indicates. But this framework has value when applied to the existential uncertainty we’re faced with across so many domains: conflict, increasingly scarce resources, antibiotic resistance, pandemic, polarised politics and cultures.
Caracciolo… identified four different levels in which literary narrative can navigate uncertainty. The author says climate-related anxiety affects the characters in a story. As a character progresses through a narrative, the reader experiences feelings of uncertainty and then begins to embrace the real-world uncertainty inherent in the texts and in the world around them. Source
We have opportunities to exercise this approach. Half of US audiences surveyed in 2021 already indicated their desire for new stories on screen over prequels. Perhaps continuing to gently encourage ourselves and others to seek out novel narratives in film and TV, especially those overtly engaged with those existential considerations, rather than self-soothing with comforting prequel content, is part of caring for our communities at large as we roll towards this increasingly volatile shared future. It also, of course, provides a financial signal to production gatekeepers about the appetite for untried properties executed well.
And if you’re part of the half of the audience keen to see more new stories on the big screen, a list of best-reviewed films of 2022, rather than highest-grossing, offers some hope for this vision of navigating uncertainty through processing narrative as a collective, with 23 of the top 25 films being original stories.
Surely studios will take that into account? Right? (Just a bit more uncertainty to embrace.)