Week-to-Week: The Legacy of Songbirds & MUTOs
Is the unavoidable cynicism of extending franchises the real monster?
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Franchise extensions are, by their nature, cynical enterprises. I don’t simply mean that we receive them cynically, although certainly as a media scholar we’re prone to assess them through the lens of their industrial utility. They’re also cynical in their development, built on the belief that an average audience will gladly accept “more” of something, no matter the machinations necessary for that “more” to exist.
And yet cynicism does not preclude creativity: in our age of I.P. domination, it’s sometimes easy to dismiss efforts like Monarch: Legacy of Monsters—the TV spinoff of Legendary’s Monstersverse—and the Hunger Games prequel The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes as part of a larger trend, but the machinations of franchise extensions can never be exactly the same. Each effort to replicate or revive a franchise’s success must be calibrated to the particular needs of that franchise, navigating both the expectations of the audience and the capacity for the world in question to face the burden of “more.” To view this as creative is not to suggest it is sheltered from criticism, but rather to allow us to explore the specific choices made by writers/directors who are keenly aware of the cynicism involved but nonetheless commit to the task at hand.
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters opens on William Randa, John Goodman’s character from Kong: Skull Island. He’s running through the jungle recording a message for his son, which he eventually tosses into the ocean when it becomes clear that it’s the only way his legacy will matter given the likelihood that he’ll die on Skull Island. And while he survives the encounter with a giant spider and a giant crab, we know that eventually he fell prey to the Skullcrawlers.
Well, we sort of know that. See, I’ve seen Kong: Skull Island, and all of what are known as the “Monsterverse” films from Legendary Pictures, but it’s been a while, and I spent the first few minutes of Monarch trying to figure out what—if any—parts of this were actually found in that film. The short answer is that while Bill Randa is not a new character, most of the details of his life between the 1943 encounter that gave him his obsession with MUTOs (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms) and his death on Skull Island thirty years later are retcons. And while Monarch: Legacy of Monsters may take time to build this connection out in its opening scene, its first two episodes that premiered over the weekend don’t actually do a whole lot with it—honestly, it took me a decent amount of time to realize that Anders Holm was playing a younger version of the character, and even once I did figure it out I’m not super convinced it really matters.
Rather, Monarch is consciously and intricately designed to maximize the show’s capacity to delve deeper into the mythos of the mysterious organization responsible for tracking and investigating MUTOs without actually stepping on the toes of the ongoing plans for the Monsterverse. It’s a timeline hopping game of fill-in-the-blanks, combining a linear narrative with a non-linear look back into the past. In the present, Bill Randa’s estranged grandchildren—a granddaughter Cate born and raised in America, a grandson Kentaro born and raised in Japan—discover one another after their father’s death, and begin investigating his double life that obviously derived from his work with Monarch. Cate’s PTSD from Godzilla’s arrival in San Francisco ensures that there’s a MUTO connection, but the bulk of the story is a more grounded family drama, with some dodging of Monarch operatives to build week-to-week intrigue. The result creates a more cost-effective core structure that can set the story comfortably within the Monsterverse timeline without needing to have the same sense of scale.
But Monarch can’t not have kaiju, and so the flashbacks are an effective tool to introduce them in efficient ways. Although, it’s wrong to call them flashbacks, at least initially: in the premiere, we see a younger Bill, his wife Dr. Keiko Muira, and their military minder Lee Shaw investigate a nuclear wasteland that’s actually hiding evidence of MUTO activity. And while we could maybe see them as Bill’s flashbacks, Goodman’s brief cameo doesn’t really anchor the story in his perspective, and so it ends up feeling more like the Monsterverse machinations driving the decision. This changes when we realize that we’re watching the story of Cate and Kentaro’s grandmother’s death, and by the second episode we also learn—as the credits admittedly already spoiled—that we are seeing flashbacks for Lee Shaw, who emerges in the present timeline in the noteworthy father-son casting with Kurt and Wyatt Russell playing him across time. And by flashing back to the three characters’ first encounter with a MUTO, the structure is now set up for a MUTO-of-the-Week format working through these early days of Monarch alongside the present timeline’s investigation of how Cate and Kentaro’s father was wrapped up in it all.
Structurally, it’s an effective way to fill in a multi-year gap in the Monsterverse timeline between the first and second Godzilla films, and a good example of creative problem-solving to ensure that it has enough of big budget filmmaking DNA without feeling like its retcons upend the primacy of the films themselves. However, the big question is whether I’ll actually care about anything that’s happening beyond that point. We know these characters aren’t a vital part of the Monsterverse in subsequent films (not that any humans are)—they are but vessels for franchise extension. This isn’t a dealbreaker, given the franchise’s primary pleasure of kaiju wreaking havoc is present, but after two episodes I’m more interested in the idea of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters than in any of its characters or plots—that does need to change if this is going to sustain interest across 10 episodes.
The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes—I’m not going to put The Hunger Games in front of it every time, Lionsgate—is a much more traditional franchise extension, likely because of its literary origins. While it’s still a deeply cynical enterprise to make a prequel novel to a successful trilogy, anchoring that creative enterprise in an original author returning to the world they created is slightly different from the franchise-by-committee nature of big budget filmmaking. And if we compare this effort and the now-doomed Fantastic Beasts extension of the Wizarding World, it matters that this originated as a Suzanne Collins novel as opposed to a ginned up guide book sloppily leveraged by its transphobic author into a makeshift mythology.
However, I can’t lie and say I wasn’t cynical about the idea of a Hunger Games prequel showing us the origins of President Snow, which is why I sat out the book’s 2020 release. And while the pending arrival of the film encouraged me to think about reading it, I never got around to it, and so I went into the film without knowing much beyond that basic logline. What I realized quickly, though, was that The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes may be a prequel to the novels, but its story is clearly inspired by the cultural impact of the adaptations. While there is certainly music in the world of Collins’ original novels, there’s no question that the almost overwhelming role that folk music plays in this story is a conscious response to the films’ soundtracks—the lyrics of ”The Hanging Tree” might have appeared originally in Mockingjay, but the idea that anyone would care about learning its origin story is 100% tied to it being brought to life in the films and then turned into a club remix for reasons I will never understand.
I was mostly neutral on the introduction of folk music into the story world: I remain a huge fan of Rachel Zegler, and thought the music itself was pretty solid, but I don’t know if her or anyone could manage to wring enough characterization out of Lucy Gray Baird (tribute from District 12) to correct the imbalance central to the story. It’s an imbalance that fuels the film’s greatest success, which is digging deeper into the history of the Hunger Games themselves. Collins’ greatest skill was in the worldbuilding fueling her dystopia, but we arrived at the Games as an established piece of this culture. The idea of flashing back 64 years to the Games in their infancy is tantalizing, and the first and second acts leverage this by foregrounding Coriolanus Snow’s role in reimagining the games from their initial incarnations. By the time Lucy Gray is singing her story in her pre-Games interview over graphics pulled directly from American Idol, the “child death as reality show” ethos of the Hunger Games has come to life, and I devoured every morsel of detail within this origin.
But do I actually care how Coriolanus Snow became President Snow? Through the first two acts of the film, the worldbuilding and the action in the arena itself sustain interest easily: Viola Davis chewing scenery and Peter Dinklage as a depressed addict may not exactly be a stretch for them, but the former is in particularly good form here, and the Games are as brutal and unforgiving as you’d expect. But this is the first film in the series that uses the arena—or, in the case of Mockingjay, the Capitol as arena—as part of the rising action, as opposed to the climax. The film is conspicuously divided into three acts by chyrons, and when we transition from the Games themselves to the aftermath, the story shifts focus exclusively to Snow and his relationship with Lucy Gray to the film’s detriment.
It’s not a terrible story, but it’s hard to get invested in any of it: it feels deeply procedural when we know that their love is doomed, and that Snow’s path will pull him deeper into the corruption of the Capitol. The film’s momentum is in a sense of discovery tied to its worldbuilding, and that’s gone when we get back to District 12 and the story must contort itself to get certain pieces into place. And because this is Snow’s story above all, Lucy Gray ends up a bit too much of an afterthought: while Snow’s point-of-view dominating Lucy’s serves that worldbuilding early in the film, it hampers the emotional climax, leaving her perspective lacking when it matters most. The way the story squares the circle of how Coriolanus became the man we meet in the original trilogy is logical, but it’s an anti-climactic end to this story, which may have been unavoidable from its very conception.
I suppose the larger point here is that there’s no way of erasing the cynicism within a project like The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes or Monarch: Legacy of Monsters: eventually, the origins of the creativity within must come to bear. But whereas the former only has 2 1/2 hours to explore before it has to pay the franchise piper, the latter has ten episodes—or heck, maybe even additional seasons—to explore the dynamics of the Monsterverse and its relationship to them. As a result, television franchise extensions are fundamentally easier to reconcile: there’s more time to adjust expectations, as opposed to having to live in the shadow of the primary text for the entire duration. The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes isn’t a bad movie because it can’t fully replicate the appeals of the Hunger Games trilogy, but it’s burdened by that connection in a way that can’t be shaken over even its long runtime. And while Monarch may eventually meet the same fate, the fact the jury is still out leaves at least a sliver of hope it evolves into its own monster, as it were.
Episodic Observations
I was a big fan of Wyatt and Kurt playing the same characters across two timelines in theory, but when I realized that in practice it means Kurt playing a character who is roughly 90? It broke me a little, not going to lie.
Related: Jason Schwartzmann has a blast playing the original “host” of the games, Lucky Flickerman, who is at least indirectly framed as Caesar Flickerman’s father (there’s a reference to a high chair as he’s trying to make a dinner reservation, but from reading online the lore suggests he can’t be his father). However, was I the only one who—given the Capitol’s investment in cosmetic surgery—wondered if he actually was a younger version of Caesar?
I suppose the big question for Monarch is whether they intend to deliver actual, new encounters with Godzilla. Cate’s memories of San Francisco allow them to deliver quickly on that front, but we inherently knew the Godzilla alarm in Tokyo wasn’t going to be a real attack, and that feeling could hamper the show as it gets deeper.
Olivia Rodrigo’s “Can’t Catch Me Now” is interesting as a way of centering Lucy Gray’s perspective, effectively memorializing the way her memory presumably haunted Snow for the rest of his life. I didn’t end up staying through the credits, but I don’t know if that’s enough to really return the story to her after the hard pivot to Snow at film’s end. And it’s hard to feel optimistic about her Oscar chances when all three previous award contenders (Taylor Swift and the Civil Wars, Coldplay, Lorde) failed to translate Golden Globe nominations into recognition from the Academy.
Zegler quite infamously turned down the role of Lucy Gray Baird when it was offered to her, and I’m really curious who else they considered for the part before she called them back to be like “Actually, about that.” It’s one thing to say the part has a lot of singing, but it really needs a particular type of singing, where it’s meant to have such strong emotional sway over her oppressors in the Capitol. Perhaps we’d have gotten a different balance of acting/singing—the accent is a bit all over the place at times—but I don’t know if the character would have worked at all if so.
Are we at the point where big-budget TV shows don’t phase us? I mean, 15 years ago it would have been unthinkable that we’d see anything of Monarch’s scale happening in TV, but at this point is it just another week?
The winks and nods to the original trilogy in Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes were mostly a distraction for me, but I’m curious how others felt about the efforts to create a backstory for Tigris’ rejection of her cousin—Hunter Schafer sells her final line effectively, but it’s a pretty tiny role, and it seemed like an example of a relationship that would have had more time in a 500-page book.
I’m also curious to hear what people’s media-related plans are over the coming American holidays—making it to theaters? Binge watches planned? Wishing everyone a safe and happy Fake Thanksgiving, a holiday you celebrate a month and a half late in this strange country.
I read the Songbirds novel when it came out a few years ago, and thought it was pretty bad. (I felt like it succeeded at the prequel worldbuilding, but didn't tell a particularly effective story in that space or tell us anything new/interesting about Snow. Lucy Gray also struck me on the page as a one-note -- pun intended -- manic pixie dream girl for his self-actualization, but I could imagine that aspect at least being better handled in adaptation.) I haven't ruled out seeing the movie at some point, but I liked the book so little that it certainly won't be a priority for me.
I agree that there's a vein of cynicism running through these franchise extensions, but for me that varies with how open-ended the saga has seemed overall. Some things like Star Wars or the MCU feel like they've always been pitched as an ongoing story, so new project announcements don't get the same automatic eyeroll from me as when a seemingly-finished series suddenly gets revived for another cash-grab.
The Hunger Games is one of the few series where I didn't try to read the book before seeing the film, but once I saw it I immediately dove in. I really enjoyed the books and thought the movies were solid, though I think it took me a while to get around the seeing movie four since I thought it was a bit ridiculous they split it into two.
I never did read Songbirds however. Maybe I'll still see it?
As for this weekend, my family is going to a real life theater to see Napoleon on Friday.