Original content is a unicorn in this day and age, and the happiest people are the ones who’ve come to understand that fresh, thrilling stories can be told in the guise of an existing property. Just look at Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal or Noah Hawley’s Fargo—original ideas can blossom in old settings. In other words, creativity and commerce can coexist; it just takes the right mind at the helm.
Whether or not that will happen in the upcoming Solo: A Star Wars Story remains to be seen, but a new essay pondering the plight of the prequel from n+1 has surfaced in the wake of its latest trailer. It essentially asks two questions: Why do people hate prequels? And, if that’s the case, why do studios keep making them?
For writer Adam Kotsko, the answer at least partly circles around questions of ownership, and how much those in control of the intellectual property acknowledge the cultural conversation surrounding the story.
Generally speaking, movies and TV shows show back-story only when it is essential to the story at hand, for instance, when it is necessary to clarify motives or lend greater emotional depth. By presenting itself as back-story to an existing narrative, a prequel therefore implicitly claims that it is essential to understanding what is at stake in that story—and worse, that the existing story was somehow incomplete before the prequel came around to fill in the gaps.