List RulesVote up the film series that would benefit the most from a quick recap.
If you’re a movie fan, then you know that modern American cinema is all about the franchise. The more movies and stars you can fit, the better. But every sequel means more story and more characters for audiences to remember. That’s why movies should have pre-credits scrolls. The device might be most closely associated with the Star Wars universe, but maybe the makers of The Fast and the Furious or the Marvel movies should start thinking about incorporating that nifty trick themselves. These are all films that require a recap, and what better way to do that then with a pre-credit scroll?
By the time you get to the third film in a franchise, no one knows what’s going on in the series anymore. And if you do, you don’t want to answer everyone else's questions. It’s better for fans' collective sanity if every movie that’s part of a franchise opens with some kind of pre-credit scroll that reminds viewers of any pertinent information. When it comes to movies that need a pre-credit scroll, exposition is welcome.
By the end of 2017, there will be 17 movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The MCU is more than just a franchise - it encompasses multiple series focusing on individual superheroes, including Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, and more.
Keeping Marvel's events, heroes, and mystical objects straight from film to film is nearly impossible. What's more, movies in the MCU are meant to reward trivia nerds with easter eggs and obscure references. Rather than a pre-credits crawl, these movies might benefit from just showing bullet points covering character information, how they tie into the rest of the universe, and everything that happened previously in whatever iteration of a Marvel movie you're watching.
Sequels are about escalation: everything has to be bigger, longer, and in the case of this franchise, things have to be driven on exponentially more insane surfaces. If you think that you can skip a few of the Furious films and know what's going on, then you're going to be more lost than Dominic Toretto without his GPS. Characters are introduced, shuffled around, and switched from good to bad with blurring speed, and callbacks to movies that are more than a decade old can leave you in the dark. A pre-credits scroll that appears in the dust kicked up by screeching tires could help clue the audience in.
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The Saw series consists of eight movies, one short film, and innumerable torture devices. And as fun as that sounds, there's also a metric ton of exposition that goes into each movie. It's not enough to have Jigsaw kidnapping people and putting them in hellish puzzle rooms, but he has to have an entire manifesto built around it.
Saw may be less of a horror franchise and more of a series of brutal memorization flash cards - which is how the opening crawl should be presented. Each film could open with Jigsaw (or his puppet) presenting all of the information from the previous films.
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One theme park ride inspired five Pirates of the Caribbean movies. The films follow Johnny Depp's bewigged Captain Jack Sparrow, but from there the connections are as loose as they are insane: mermaids, zombie pirates, and krakens all appear at one point or another. Usually, everyone is after some random trinket, but mostly the films serve as an excuse for Depp to chew scenery and earn Disney money.
The Pirates franchise seems naturally suited to a pre-credits crawl. It could be written across an old-fashioned scroll, or perhaps a treasure map.
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Jacob Shelton
