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.
