When Watching a Movie Starts Feeling Like Homework

 

There was a time when watching a movie was a simple experience. You bought a ticket, entered the theatre, watched a story unfold and walked out with a complete experience. You did not need to remember twelve characters from four earlier films, watch two streaming series or search YouTube for a twenty-minute recap before entering the cinema.

Today, moviegoing increasingly feels like homework.

Before watching the latest instalment of a franchise, you are expected to remember what happened several years ago, understand references to another series and wait through the credits for a short scene advertising the next product. Instead of asking, “Was this a good movie?”, the discussion is often about what it sets up for the next phase, sequel, spin-off or cinematic universe.

Somewhere in this obsession with continuity, cinema is losing the carefree pleasure of simply telling a good story.

From storytelling to content production

Streaming platforms and studios are under constant pressure to release more content and keep audiences continuously engaged. As a result, filmmaking increasingly resembles a mass-production system.

Find a successful formula. Standardize it. Reuse the same template. Increase the budget. Add familiar faces. Create some off-screen drama. Generate social-media discussions. Then announce the sequel before the audience has even watched the first film.

Large budgets are advertised as if they automatically guarantee quality. Publicity campaigns focus on production costs, opening-weekend collections, casting controversies and behind-the-scenes rumours. The story itself sometimes feels secondary.

It is not that expensive films cannot be good. Spectacle has always been an important part of cinema. The problem begins when spectacle is expected to compensate for weak writing. A larger explosion does not create greater emotional impact, and another digitally destroyed city does not automatically raise the stakes.

The audience may be impressed for a few minutes, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to remain emotionally invested in stories where everything feels manufactured.

Nostalgia has become a business model

Nostalgia was once used to create an emotional connection. Now it often feels like a resource being extracted until nothing remains.

Old characters are repeatedly brought back. Famous dialogues are recycled. Familiar musical themes are inserted at carefully planned moments. Actors return to roles they played decades ago, not necessarily because the story requires them, but because recognition reduces the commercial risk.

Audiences enter expecting to relive an old emotion. For a few seconds, seeing a familiar face or hearing a familiar background score works. But after the applause fades, the film still needs a story.

Too often, nostalgia is being used to hide the absence of one.

There is nothing wrong with revisiting a fictional world when there is genuinely something new to explore. The problem is when a story that ended satisfactorily is reopened only because the brand still has commercial value.

Not every character needs an origin story. Not every villain needs a streaming series. Not every supporting character needs a spin-off. And not every successful movie needs to become a “universe.”

Sometimes, “The End” should actually mean the end.

The superhero overdose

Superhero films are not inherently the problem. Some have been genuinely creative, emotionally powerful and culturally important. The problem is the sheer volume of similar content.

When every few months brings another superhero, another interconnected universe, another multiverse and another threat to the entire world, the extraordinary gradually becomes ordinary.

How many times can the planet or the universe be saved before the danger stops feeling dangerous?

The multiverse has made this worse. Death can be reversed, characters can return as alternate versions and unsuccessful story decisions can be quietly replaced through another timeline. When every consequence can be undone, emotional investment becomes difficult.

Even television has become compulsory viewing for films. Missing one streaming series can mean entering a movie without understanding a character, conflict or reference. Entertainment should not require a continuity chart.

A viewer should be able to enjoy a film without conducting research beforehand.

Please let the retired operative retire

Alongside the superhero flood, Hollywood has developed another favourite template: the retired soldier, intelligence operative, assassin or police officer who is forced to return after someone attacks his family.

We know the sequence.

He wants a peaceful life. Someone from his past appears. A family member is kidnapped or killed. The authorities are corrupt. He opens an old box containing weapons and photographs. Within the next two hours, he single-handedly destroys an international criminal organization.

This formula was entertaining when it felt fresh. Now there seems to be an unlimited supply of former operatives with tragic pasts and surprisingly large ammunition reserves.

Hollywood, please let some of these people enjoy their retirement.

A familiar formula can still produce a good movie, but repetition without reinvention eventually turns entertainment into what can only be described as expensive slop.

Some recent refreshing examples

Being a science-fiction lover, I naturally enjoyed Project Hail Mary's scientific problem-solving and its imaginative depiction of alien life. However, what made the movie memorable was not merely the presence of spacecraft, distant stars or an alien species.

It was the relationship at the centre of the story.

The alien was not simply a humanoid character with unusual makeup. Its biology, communication, environment and understanding of the universe felt genuinely different. At the same time, the emotional connection developed through curiosity, cooperation and a shared struggle for survival.

Most importantly, the movie told a complete story.

It did not spend its final minutes introducing another villain or announcing the next mission. It reached a meaningful conclusion and allowed the audience to leave with a sense of closure. No sequel has been announced, and the film currently stands as a complete story rather than the first chapter of another compulsory universe. 

That sense of completion has become surprisingly rare.

I felt something similar while watching Obsession. Irrespective of whether one agrees with every creative choice, it functions as its own experience. It does not appear to exist merely to prepare the ground for five future instalments.

I would even place Dhurandhar in a broadly similar category. Although released in two parts, the two films essentially function as extensions of one larger narrative. A story being divided because of its length is different from a franchise being kept alive indefinitely to extract more money from a familiar name. Dhurandhar was initially conceived as one film before being structured as a two-part saga. 

The important thing is that the storyteller knows the destination.

Sequels are not the enemy

The problem is not the existence of sequels or franchises. Some stories genuinely require multiple films. A rich fictional world can support several meaningful narratives, and audiences naturally want to revisit characters they love.

The difference lies in intent.

Does another film exist because the story has more to say? Or is another story being manufactured because the brand has more money to make?

A good continuation expands the original. A weak franchise merely repeats it with a higher budget.

The best multi-part stories still provide progression, consequences and an eventual conclusion. They respect the audience’s time. They do not treat viewers as permanent subscribers to intellectual property.

Cinema cannot be run only like a factory

Manufacturing depends on standardization, repetition and predictability. Those principles help a factory produce more units with fewer variations.

Storytelling needs almost the opposite.

It needs imagination, risk, surprise and occasionally the courage to create something that cannot be easily converted into a ten-year business plan.

Studios understandably want financial security, but excessive dependence on familiar brands eventually creates creative stagnation. When every project is designed by looking at what succeeded earlier, audiences receive increasingly polished versions of things they have already seen.

Cinema may become more expensive, but it does not necessarily become more interesting.

Hopefully, the success of self-contained films will remind studios that audiences are not tired of movies. We are tired of being sold the same movie repeatedly under different titles.

We still want the excitement of entering a theatre without preparation. We want to meet new characters, discover unfamiliar worlds and experience stories whose endings carry real consequences. We want films that stay with us because of what they said not because their post-credit scenes told us what to watch next.

A movie should earn our attention for its duration. It should not demand our loyalty for the next decade.

Perhaps the most refreshing thing a filmmaker can now offer is also the simplest: a beginning, a middle and an ending.

And the confidence to stop there.