Evil Bong (2006) and Characters Being Featured in Other Movies

Studios and filmmakers are always trying to find new ways to keep audiences coming back to their franchises, or to even come to their movies in the first place.  The marketing for a movie is such an everyday distraction for us movie watchers.  But there are other ways than marketing to get an audience for a movie.  The one aspect that I would like to write about for this week’s post is the idea of characters crossing over into other franchises.

The idea of characters appearing in other franchises is something that is commonly done on television.  I could name many more television crossovers than I can film crossovers.  There are many more spin-offs on television than in the movies.  That doesn’t matter, though.  What matters is the crossovers in movies that are meant to get millions of people to pay the eight to twenty dollar price in order to watch the movie in theaters, or on the DVD or blu-ray that they purchase.  If a potential viewer has the knowledge that one of their favourite characters is going to show up in this movie as well, they may be more inclined to view the movie.  This is what the studios think, and this is why there are sometimes crossovers in movies.

The movie crossovers can be categorized in two ways.  The first is when the movie is about the characters being together.  The second is when characters show up to cameo in another movie.  I’m going to go over both in a little more detail than what those one sentence descriptions gave.  Both have their own benefits but also have their drawbacks as well.

First, let’s think about when two or more popular characters come together in one movie.  This is an easy way to make more money.  The studio gets to bring in each of the characters they want and potentially get the audience of all characters.  There are many examples of this sort of movie making.  Freddy vs. Jason is one that comes to mind immediately, as well as Alien vs. Predator.  Each movie pits one iconic horror figure against another.  But the movies I really want to talk about when it comes to this method of crossing characters are the Marvel Studios films.

In 2008, with the release of Iron Man, Marvel Studios began to build a universe unlike any universe previously seen in film.  At the end of Iron Man, Nick Fury stepped out of the shadows to reveal that he was building a team.  This team would end up being The Avengers.  The film The Avengers was released in 2012.  It was a teaming up of characters from various films.  Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, and The incredible Hulk all had their own films prior to The Avengers.  Black Widow, Nick Fury, Loki, Hawkeye, and Agent Coulson had each appeared in some of the films that the other characters starred in.  This is the most ambitious franchise building in film history.  A bunch of characters who starred in their own films have come together to make one movie in which they would each support each other and get their own share of the screen time.  It ended up leading to a billion dollar grossing film, so the studio was right to do this.  They brought all of these popular movie characters together to reap the profits.

The other potentially profitable way of crossing characters over into other franchises or movies is to have them simply cameo in something.  The actor need not be paid as much as they would be for a starring role, but the studio gets the associative bonus of having the character and actor appear in another film.  It’s an easy win.

A movie that has used this cameo method as a way to promote itself is Evil Bong.  Evil Bong was released in 2006 by Full Moon Features, the production company of Charles Band, the director.  The movie was about a bong that takes the souls of the people who smoke from it.  The souls are transported to an inter-dimensional strip club, making it easy for other Charles Band characters to appear.  The Gingerdead Man, Jack Deth from Trancers, Ivan Burroughs from Decadent Evil, Ooga Booga from Doll Graveyard, and Jack Attack from Demonic Toys all make cameo appearances in Evil Bong.  That’s five characters from five different Charles Band franchises that show up in Evil Bong.  They aren’t a big part of the movie.  None of the characters affect the story at all.  The reason they are here is for the completists of these franchises to watch Evil Bong.  I don’t know how well this way of crossing characters over worked for Charles Band.  From what I can find online, some of the fans of Charles Band’s movies like the appearances of the characters.  It worked that much.

There is financial success to be found in crossing characters over into other movies and franchises.  The success might create a failure in the creativity of a movie.  In the case of Evil Bong, the appearances of these characters make the pace of the movie fall off a little bit.  In the case of The Avengers, it worked well to help form a cohesive crime fighting team, and give backstory to them without wasting time in the team movie.  There are definitely benefits and setbacks to using pre-existing characters in a movie that isn’t a direct sequel.

Does the idea of characters crossing over to other movies or franchises interest you at all?  It’s something that is slowly becoming more frequent as studios notice the potential of doing so.  The future could bring many great crossovers and many terrible crossovers.  We won’t know how the movie landscape will be changed, but we can look at how it has already been changed.  But that’s another post for another time.  For now, we have the concept of crossovers to sit on.

I, of course, have some notes to share with all of you:

• Charles Band was also involved in the making of Robot Jox and Robot Wars, two of the previous movies in the Sunday “Bad” Movies.
• If you have any suggestions for movies to cover, feel free to suggest them in the comments or on Twitter.  I will be filling in a new section of movies in my schedule soon, so now would be a great time to get your suggestions in.