I’ll never forget my experience of taking my seven-year-old to see. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse in the cinema, and I don’t mean that in a good way. The little fellow enjoyed it enormously – we devoured a half bucket of pick’n’mix and cheered at the spidey-dino – and then, right at the climax, decided he needed to go to the loo. We rushed out, did the thing as fast as a seven-year-old can, rushed back – and everyone was leaving. “It finished just after you left,” said a sympathetic fellow parent, as the cinema staff vacuumed up popcorn. “I think there’s going to be a sequel.”
Maybe I’m an idiot – I definitely still don’t understand how a multiverse works – but I sort of think this ought to be illegal, or at least a matter for trading standards. As far as I can remember, it was heavily implied that this was going to be a self-contained story. To make matters worse, this trend seems to be gathering steam – Dune got away with it because nobody expected Denis Villeneuve to cram all that delicious spice into one film, but when even Fast X is leaving you without any emotional resolution, you know something’s rotten in Hollywood. And now there’s Wicked – famously based on a show that’s already split into two parts but still lasts less than three hours. I’m not sure who’s to blame for this – Kevin Feige? George Lucas? – but at least I know going in that Star Wars and Marvel are never, ever going to end.
All I’m asking, film-advertisers, is: please be upfront about this. I’ll watch two more Wonkas and three more Paddingtons if you let me see them on my own terms – but if you trick me into watching one more cliffhanger, I’ll resent you for ever. In an era where nobody wants to go to the cinema anyway, making consumers demand a poster sticker saying “This film has an ending” feels incredibly shortsighted, if not actively self-destructive. Mercifully, as far as my seven-year-old is concerned, the prospect of waiting several years for the next tale from the Spider-Verse had no effect at all on his psyche: he forgot the whole thing when the sugar-high wore off.
Joel Snape is a writer and fitness expert
