For a long time I've believed that a good story has a beginning, a middle, and crucially: an end. And it's that last part that I feel a lot of media doesn't deliver today: it's all about franchises that just go on forever, constantly pumping out more sequels, dragging something that was once great throught the dirt to try to squeeze a little more profit out of it.
It's gotten to the point that many shows don't seem to pay any attention at all to wrapping up story arcs and giving any kind of closure; all they care about is constantly creating new narrative hooks to try to bait the audience into clicking the "next episode" button. Entire movies are made with the apparent singular purpose of transitioning the audience over to the replacement protagonist when the original actor is too old, so they can just keep churning out more and more sequels and spinoffs.
But we all knew that, we've all known that for a long time. That's not the point of this post. The point is I can't seem to find a good metaphor. Here's one I came up with today:
"A good story is like a good meal. It might just be a single course, or it might be several: starter, main, desert. But eventually the meal has to be over. You can't just keep adding more courses forever, instead focus on preparing a new meal."
OK, it's not a perfect metaphor. I think the problem is that you can take a property, like say the Avengers, and tell good stories for a very long, rotating characters out of the limelight and even the story as a whole as they complete their narrative arc. So if you see "The Avengers" as a story, then yes, in theory "a story" can go on for a very long time. But I think you have to break it down more: not everything written about the Avengers is a single story; the team can keep reinventing itself, serving as a framework for many different stories. And even then I'm not sure it doesn't get tired eventually; even then it might be better to end it all and start something new at some point.
Anyway. The point is, there are a lot of properties that I wish had gone out while they were on top, rather than trying over and over to go back to the well in increasing stale attempts at recapturing the magic of the original. The Terminator franchise should have stopped at the second - or at least it should have stopped trying to remake the second and continued to advance the story; I'll take Salvation over any of the later entries any day.
Perhaps the real problem is that motivations behind the endless instalments. Perhaps they are just not being created for the right reasons, the people in charge are making the wrong decisions because they have the wrong motivation - wrong for creating something great at least?
Eh, what do I know.
