Crossover Films and Shows

For those who watch Penny Dreadful or who plan to watch it but are not fully caught up, I want to give you a heads up that this posting contains spoilers.

Awesome show

So I was watching the latest episode of Penny Dreadful today, an awesome and bizarre horror show on Showtime that manages to combine the characters from different classic horror novels so that they are all living in London together. Not the most unique idea. It's been done before (and has failed miserably).

Exhibit's A and B (League of Extraordinary Gentleman was so bad it made Sean Connery quit acting forever).

But Penny Dreadful has managed to place Dorian Grey, characters from Dracula (but not the head vampire himself… yet), and Victor Frankenstein into this show where they all interact with one another and deal with crazy supernatural shit. The spoiler surprise ending from the last episode of season one was Joshua Hartnett's character turning out to be a werewolf the whole time (totally unexpected with nothing to give that twist away). It was like The Sixth Sense of endings.

And now, this latest episode, you find out that Hartnett's character, Ethan Chandler, has been hiding his identity and that his real name is Lawrence Talbot.

Lawrence Talbot

So now my only question at this point, is where the hell is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?

Or Jack Griffin?

When trying to combine franchises, characters, movies, etc. into one big combined mess, sometimes you can get it right, and sometimes it ends up being… a giant turd of a movie.

Giant turd of a movie

Gianter turd of a movie

Seriously?

Avengers got it right, but they are also taking their stories from comics where all of the same said characters also share the same universe and interact on a regular basis. The source material is a combined universe, so I am not sure how much that one counts. But it seems like more often than not, these kinds of mergers are not too successful. It takes a good story, good writing, to make something like this work. A Sci-Fi Channel (sorry… SyFy) original movie is most likely not going to be revered for its outstanding story and amazingly written script. Sometimes it's good to just leave a good thing alone. You don't always need sequels, you don't always have to have in-depth background stories, and you definitely don't need to have characters from one film meet characters from another completely unrelated film.

Yeah… don't think this one would work.

Toy Story 4 fan fic poster from http://brechtvanco.deviantart.com/art/Toy-story-4-321291433