Franchise woes?

[Yukaphile]

Wait, what first timeskip? You do know there are many of them in the series...

[Deledrius]

The obvious answers are Alien and Terminator. Granted both of those haven’t been good since about 1993 but there’s always *just* enough good ideas in each new entry that you think for a second they might turn it around.

Yup. So much potential, and each time we get farther from the possibility of achieving it as more and more poor decisions become piled on top of the canon.

Star Wars, Star Trek, Valiant Comics, Marvel Comics and movies.

Jury is out: James Bond.

Definitely Star Trek. There's a large degree of fragmentation going on, all as a result of the failure of Nemesis, the subsequent "reboots", and the new series. It's turning into that mess of "well, this timeline exists because of X" nonsense that caused comics to implode, which was never the case before in Trek for the franchise as a whole. This was a massive mistake. Explaining to casual viewers that Discovery takes place before TOS but isn't in the JJ universe is a conversation I've had to have many times, and it's not fun. And it shouldn't have been necessary if the studios did their jobs.

Bond had a soft reboot for the first time with Brosnan, and a hard reboot with Craig, and honestly neither of them made the franchise better off. Spectre improved things after the disaster that was Skyfall, but given the inverse popularity to quality of those I don't expect the next film to improve the situation. Craig just doesn't work as Bond, and the character feels woefully unsuited for the modern day. The sort of spy film that Bond necessitates in 2019 is very different than 1962, but watching Bond sit at a computer for an entire movie just wouldn't be engaging in the same way. I think the fragmentations have been well-intentioned, but chasing after a vanishing setting.

ReBoot
Some stuff in the Lord of the Rings series outside of the books

Reboot could definitely use a reboot, but the one we got was not it (it was in-name-only, really). Remake the show, give it a complete overhaul visually and fix some of the dumb parts and you'd have something solid that works today, even without needing to update the tech world much.

What Lord of the Rings stuff outside the books? Do you mean the film adaptations? Tolkien didn't make anything but books, unless you mean his notes?

A far as Harry Potter goes Fantastic Beasts haven't really raised confidence to franchise's future.

I agree, and the sad thing is that the creator's still involved with a lot of power, so the fragmentation seems to fall at her own feet. Cursed Child was an utter mess (and even though she claims involvement, the writing style speaks to the truth being otherwise). Going forward, Fantastic Beasts so far has some very engaging and interesting ideas, but the films are intent on avoiding those as much as possible to focus on things that stray far from both the main story and the most relevant parts of the HP universe. Crimes of Grindelwald outright assassinated several characters for no good reason, and it's going to be difficult to maintain another three films after that. Depp was a casting mistake for that character which is haunting every film in the series. Both of the FB films are two completely separate movies that have been spell-o-taped together in the most haphazard way, and it's threatening to weaken the possibility of future books and movies in the same universe.

[Yukaphile]

Oh hell, Star Trek and Star Wars are the most painful for me. "Fandom fragmentation" fits the phenomenon well. We need to give it to the people now. Put Star Trek and Star Wars into the public domain.

Yeah, the reboot of ReBoot was just to cash in on the name to sell what was basically VR Troopers or Code Lyoko. But at least it's not part of the original canon. I shudder to think when they will revisit that... it's such that not even Gavin Blair himself likes it. I know, I've asked him on Twitter.

Harry Potter was good, but it wasn't quite the bastion of literature people think it was. After Goblet of Fire, it kept stretching my disbelief further and further. It felt stagnant. Animorphs was much better.

[Admiral X]

Mass Effect. I'm also amongst the minority that views ME2 in a negative light.

[Yukaphile]

Eh, I prefer being in the minority. Buck the conventional wisdom! Be a loner!

[Beelzquill]

The upcoming lord of the rings aragorn tv series for me. Why?? There is basically no tension in Aragorn's story, he will live, his girlfriend and legolas will live, He'll be king eventually. All it will do is ruin his character with teenage angsting about "Numenorian Guilt" because he's isildur's heir that will lose all the nuance that was in the movies and wasn't even in the books.

I'm also really uneasy the future of the MCU, I'm hopeful but it seems weird to make Jane Foster Thor when you have Valkyrie and Lady Sif right there.

edit: Also why is the new berserk anime such shit? CLANG

[Yukaphile]

Oh, count Pokemon among them for me. And not just because I'm nostalgic. They seem to want it both ways: To reboot the story, or to remake a new protagonist with all the traditional qualities of a shonen hero, but then they can't let Ash win a League or grow up or do anything new outside the norm because then they're worried their sales would plummet. So they've settled on a piss-poor "soft reboot" compromise. They claim Ash is a new person, but we still meet previous characters from the show before. I don't mind a series where Ash is rebooted or where he never grows up, but for God's sake, this just reeks of laziness. And I expect better from Japanese anime. It's a damned shame too, because the Adventures manga would be ripe for an anime adaptation. It's the serious, serialized storytelling with compressed arcs that the anime is not. It's for the older kids. Not the real tiny tots.

[Mecha82]

edit: Also why is the new berserk anime such shit? CLANG

I am fan of 1998 Berserk but it also has it's flaws like over use of still frames and being based on still ongoing manga so that it could had only covered Golden Age Arc. Oh and they had time skip between Guts being in hell and preparing for his vengeance cutting out how he and Caska were saved.

[Yukaphile]

Big problem with modern anime is it's sped up too quick. You can blame idiots who joked how Dragon Ball took 90 episodes to get to the fights or so on for that reason.

[Makeshift Python]

DRAGON BALL had a relatively good pace for awhile, but it was starting to indulge in padding particularly with Freeza's infamous "five minutes". I understand this is partially because the series production was trying not to catch up so quickly with the manga, hence the implementation of filler, but hey. Maybe they should have taken breaks in between episodes. To my understanding, DRAGON BALL ran non-stop weekly from 1986 to 1995. That's why Funimation's choice of "seasons" is odd because this show was never grouped as such.