Enough Of These Cinematic Universes!

When Marvel Comics, which owns a lot of internationally best-selling comic characters and other such strong players, came together to create things like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it made sense. We have seen crossovers like Iron Man turning up in the Spider-Man movie, and Superman locking horns with Batman, and various Avengers characters mixing up with other superheroes. It sounded fun, logical and stunning as well. Cut to Indian films, the entire term ‘cinematic universe’ has become a dumb spectacle now.

Other day, YRF’s latest spyverse film “Alpha” was released, and it got slammed by critics big time. The audience is wondering why YRF would even call them spy verse when the cameos of stars from other films are making no sense, and the story is never connected to the other universe-related elements. Similarly, in the south, we have Lokesh Kanagaraj talking about Lokiverse, or the LK Cinematic Universe, which failed to make sense after the flop show of the Coolie movie. Though he used characters from the Khaidi movie quite well in Vikram, these real-life characters will never fit as well as superhero characters do.

Cut to Telugu, even Prashant Varma, with just one hit film titled HanuMan, has announced a series of films from the universe, while, except for the Lord Hanuman title in the film, no other character actually stood out or was remembered by the audience. Indian filmmakers announcing ‘cinematic universes’ are nothing but cashing on the craze, and there should be creative brilliance as well to cash in like that. Otherwise, things end up like YRF’s Alpha, Lokesh’s Coolie and PRshanth’s scrapped movies. That’s why even the audience are saying enough of this universe system now.