Charlize Theron’s ‘The Old Guard,’ Currently Netflix’s Most-Watched Movie, Is Yet Another Franchise-Starter That Feels Like A TV Pilot - Forbes

It would be something of a calamity if the film wasn’t at least in the top ten, considering the media attention and star power (specifically Charlize Theron in the lead role) for this $70 million comic book/superhero movie, although the idea of it earning mostly positive reviews and still ending up behind the likes of Unsolved Mysteries and The Lorax would have qualified as an all-too-fitting metaphorical irony.

However, I didn’t care for the film as much as many of my (very smart) peers because it played less like a movie and more like a TV pilot or feature-length prequel to the next chapter.

No spoilers, but it felt like set-up for the actual movie, with (like Elizabeth Banks’ Charlie’s Angels) that obnoxious “You’ll get to see this cool adventure… next time!” tease..

The question is whether that this film debuted on Netflix and not in theaters merited the presumption that we’d get another one of these. You can argue Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom acted as glorified set-up for Jurassic World: Dominion, but A) Fallen Kingdom felt like a stand-alone movie and B) Jurassic World earned $1.671 billion worldwide so its sequel being successful enough to merit a third film felt like a safe bet.

It’s a little ironic that The Old Guard premiered just days before the 20th anniversary of Bryan Singer’s X-Men, a film that felt like a new kind of franchise-starter, one that played like a TV pilot that ended with a glorified “To be continued!” The whole “first movie is set-up” gambit, inspired by comic books and episodic TV which can spend the first issue/episode on table-setting, is now almost a sub-genre unto itself.

If we do get The Old Guard 2 which gives us an adventure based on the notions teased out at the end of this movie, it will be a somewhat unprecedented victory.

I've studied the film industry, both academically and informally, and with an emphasis in box office analysis, for nearly 30 years

I've studied the film industry, both academically and informally, and with an emphasis in box office analysis, for nearly 30 years