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With Alien: Romulus, The Fly, and more, horror movies have reinvented a classic movie format

Who needs movies of the week when horror movies are always looking for new blood?

Features by Graeme McMillan, Editor

Published on Wed Nov 13 2024

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Of all the things I expected to come out of Disney+’s recent documentary Music By John Williams with, an appreciation for the bygone days of American television wasn’t one of them. And yet, there’s a line in the movie that left me surprisingly nostalgic for an industry that no longer existed… until I realized that it has, accidentally, recreated itself in another area altogether. And, surreally, we have Hollywood’s drive towards transforming everything into a franchise to thank.

At an early point in the John Williams documentary, the legendary composer talks about his time working on multiple Movies of the Week for television in the 1960s and ‘70s; in passing, he mentions that it allowed him to work with a lot of filmmakers who were just getting their start in the business at the time, including Brian DePalma and Sydney Pollack. I saw that and had a pang of sadness that, bluntly, we don’t have Movies of the Week on television anymore, thereby cutting off an entry path into making movies for a new generation of directors, but also an introductory path for viewers to find these new directors. There was an ecosystem there that feels, in retrospect, particularly healthy (and maybe even necessary) to replenish and refresh people’s expectations of the movie industry that just… isn’t there anymore.

That loss — the lack of a support structure for new talent that puts work in front of an audience open to, if not eagerly excited for, the experience — stuck with me for roughly 24 hours, and then I found out that 20th Century Studios is making a new Fly movie with Nanny director Nikyatu Jusu, which made me realize… oh, we do still have Movies of the Week, it’s just that they’re studios’ attempts to maintain horror franchises.

It’s not just Jusu’s new Fly movie, after all; it’s 20th Century looking to Fede Álvarez’s Alien: Romulus, and Dan Trachtenberg’s Prey to maintain the Alien and Predator franchises, too. (And whatever the secret mystery Predator movie coming out at some point in the next few months may be, for that matter.) 20th Century Studios has previously publicly stated an intent to work with new talent to keep particular fan favorite franchises alive at a relatively low cost — a move that, judging from the box office success of Romulus, seems to be working out just fine for everyone involved so far.

20th Century isn’t the only studio that does this; Shudder’s V/H/S franchise is filled with directors getting their big breaks, and Blumhouse has worked with up-and-coming filmmakers in its multiple projects, as well. (Legendary and Warner Bros. have worked with lesser-known directors throughout its Monsterverse, also.) In each of these cases, the decision to go with younger talent is almost entirely financial, but that works in the filmmakers’ benefit, by pushing them to, for all intents and purposes, show off in ways that disguise the budget and convince the viewers of what they’re watching. In each case, it’s the contemporary equivalent of a Movie of the Week: a chance for a rising talent to take a formula and an inherited audiences and show what they can really do when given the chance.

(There’s an argument to be made that Marvel does the same thing, but Marvel’s particular aesthetic tends to overpower individual creativity in its cinematic output, for better or worse.)

It’s unlikely this new entry point was created specifically to replace the Movie of the Week model of training and introducing new talent, but it nonetheless has fallen into this function anyway, while simultaneously serving the purposes of each studio looking to keep intellectual property viable in the hopes of building out more and more franchises into profitable, self-sustaining enterprises.

I’d make a joke about cinema, like life, finding a way, except that Jurassic World went with the established Gareth Edwards for its next movie… Edwards, who, of course, came to many peoples’ attention because of Legendary and Warner Bros. using him on 2014’s Godzilla reboot. There's an argument to be made that there might be a better, cheaper choice for director out there for that project, but let's be honest: there's something fitting about a movie franchise about dinosaurs being slow to get with the times.

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Graeme McMillan: Popverse Editor Graeme McMillan (he/him) has been writing about comics, culture, and comics culture on the internet for close to two decades at this point, which is terrifying to admit. He completely understands if you have problems understanding his accent.