Say what you will about an oversaturated market that only has so much time for originality, but there can be a lot to love about franchise films. Whether it be the feeling of being a part of something bigger, that “welcome back” ethos of every new film, and the characters that you get to fall in love with over the course of it all.
That being said, they also tend to epitomize the saying “too much of a good thing,” and many filmgoers have found themselves getting burnt out by franchise fatigue as a result. With the Marvel Cinematic Universe still being a driving force in the entertainment market, to say nothing of James Gunn’s incoming DCU, you could just as easily call it superhero fatigue.
It’s not just audiences who contend with the relentlessness of franchise films; the people who work on them perhaps know this better than anyone. Franchises are best consumed in healthy doses, and when you spend over five years immersed in the creation of them, as director David F. Sandberg has done with the DCEU film Shazam! and upcoming sequel Shazam! Fury of the Gods, you realize just how overdue you are for a break.
In an interview with The Playlist, Sandberg seemed to paint the Gunn reboot as a lucky break, noting how he has several other non-franchise projects waiting for him in his backlog, and expressed enthusiasm at the opportunity to mix things up after eating, sleeping, and breathing Shazam! for so long.
“I don’t know exactly what my next move is because we’ve got a few things at various stages of development. The Culling is one of them. We’ll see which one comes together first; that’s the approach you have to have. You get a lot of things going and then move on to whichever one can get the green light first. I’ve been working on Shazam! since 2017, something like that, multi-year projects. You just want to mix it up.”
The Culling, the project named by Sandberg in the quote above, would see the director return to his horror roots that first sprouted with Lights Out and Annabelle: Creation, and would follow the plight of a priest who battles a demon from the questionable confines of a cabin deep in the woods.
In the meantime, we’ll just have to see how memorable of a franchise sendoff Shazam! Fury of the Gods ends up being for Sandberg when it releases to theaters on March 17.