When you place women in creative control of a franchise you get an obsessive focus on "character development." Plot is just a vehicle for explaining characters.
https://twitter.com/DiscussingFilm/status/1462786734236782594
Men are interested in things. Women are interested in people. When women do the storytelling the characters are the reason for the story. Events, environments, circumstance, story arch, are ancillary to understanding the characters.
Look at any series written, directed or produced by women and you'll see the obsessive need to explain a character's past by going back in time to understand why they're doing what they do in the now.
In the Netflix streaming video era we don't watch stories, we watch serials. 8-10 one-hour "bingeable" episodes are designed for engagement in the same way our social media is designed to keep us scrolling for the next dopamine hit.
The female character-development approach to storytelling is what makes a series engaging in the same way soap operas work. Events and circumstance only serve to explain the character.
The formula becomes one of wasting 8-10 hours watching a serial drag through characters' psychologies (all of which are clichéd templates) to get to the season finale cliffhanger where the plot is hurriedly summed up in 30 minutes.
This is why 2-3 hour movies in a theater are so disappointing now. To tell a riveting story in 2 hours necessitates a focus on plot at the expense of character development. Female storytelling fails miserably at this.
Not that female creators don't try. Characters are the reason for the story, but the story has to unfold. In a movie, female creators must serve 2 masters. The result is 1 dimensional characters and a contrived, aimless plot.
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Audiences don't know how to watch a movie anymore, and female-thinking writers don't know how to actually tell a story. A 3 movie trilogy is 6-8 hours on average. 4 seasons of a Netflix series is about 40 hours of "content".
We get pissed off at how a series ends or that Netflix cancels a popular show abruptly, but the reason is the content creators are out of gas. The series was about characters, and in 40+ hours they're pretty well explained. They simply have no skill at storytelling.
Your beloved story franchises are dead, and will continue to be casualties of this dynamic combined with the profitability of nostalgia.
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