The life of an artist and storyteller is one of continuous self-improvement. Until you can paint as well as Michaelangelo or write as well as Tolstoy, there is nothing for it but practicing and improving your skills. Posts like this contain bits of insight I have gathered over my own journey.

Something I’ve been thinking about lately is a concept I call “spectacle creep” (so labeled because I don’t know any other term for it). I would define it thus: “when the stakes of a series are repeatedly raised in an attempt to amaze the audience”.

The idea is that once an audience has seen something cool or exciting, the next book, movie, episode, etc. feels compelled to top it. That doesn’t sound so bad in and of itself, but it becomes a problem in long-running series (and eventually the entertainment industry itself) when audiences have already seen the same old sights and want to see something new and even more exciting.

The problem is similar to the one experienced by those who love and ride lots of roller coasters. The smaller ones may have excited them at first, but eventually, the experience is diluted by repitition. Then they need to go on bigger and faster ones to get the same thrill they used to, and when that gets dull, they move on to the next one, and so on.

I will first use examples derived from Disney’s “Pirates of the Caribbean” series– to be specific, the sword fights within it.

Here’s a small nugget of wisdom for you: like real estate, sword fights are all about location, location, location. Yes, strong choreography and noteworthy participants are vital, but to really sell the audience on the scene, you must have it take place in a memorable location. That location is often subject to spectacle creep.

In the first movie, “Curse of the Black Pearl”, the first sword fight we see is between William Turner (played by Orlando Bloom) and Captain Jack Sparrow (played by Johnny Depp). Jack is on the run from the law when he is stopped by Will in his blacksmith shop, and there they engage in a duel.

It takes place around the forge, the mill, and even up in the rafters until Jack cheats to win. The restrained environment makes it fitting for Will’s first fight, and it helps warm up the audience to what they should expect to see. To be clear, none of this means the scene is bad, and it still stands out among the many fights in the series, but it has far smaller stakes than what is to come.

At the climax of the same movie, Will and Jack et. al are fighting the evil Captain Barbossa in La Isla de Muerta. For those of you who don’t speak Spanish, that would be “The Island of Death”. The scene takes place in a cave with moonlight-revealing holes in the roof, and around the small pools of seawater are mounds upon mounds of glittering, plundered treasure, all of which are centered around a hollow altar filled with cursed coins. Oh, and most participants in the fight are also cursed so that they turn into skeletons whenever exposed to the aformentioned moonlight. How’s that for a location?

In the second movie, “Dead Man’s Chest”, the biggest fight (aside from them fighting the Kraken) takes place on a small island where Jack, Will, and disgraced Commodore James Norrington (played by Jack Davenport) are fighting for a key to the titular chest. It starts out on a nice beach, but it quickly turns into a chase where the three of them pursue each other into a jungle, then into a ruined church, come out onto the roof of that church, then fight on top of and inside a rolling water wheel that rolls back down to the beach where they started.

Finally there is the third movie, “At World’s End”. The last big fight occurs between the heroes on the Black Pearl and the bad guys on the Flying Dutchman, which are composed of goons working for the evil British guy and the cursed fish-men in the employ of Davy Jones (played by Bill Nighy, not the “Science Guy”). It takes place in pouring rain (which always makes things a little more dramatic) while both ships are swirling around and firing at each other because they are caught in the maelstrom. The central focus is on Captain Jack as he climbs up into the mast and rigging of the Flying Dutchman where he fights Davy Jones, and as circumstances require, he grabs a rope and drops onto the deck where the fight continues. There’s even more to it than that, but it would take too long to explain.

As much as I like those movies and those particular scenes, I feel tired just describing them. That is one unfortunate side-effect of spectacle creep: audience fatigue. In short, the viewers get exhausted by the flashy effects and life-or-death consequences and wish things would just slow down so they could take a breath. In time, they may take a break from the series, causing notable financial loss for the company that made it.

Movie makers can fight it as much as they want, but audience fatigue will catch up eventually. Take “Star Wars”, for instance. After the success of “The Force Awakens” and “Rogue One”, Disney decided that “Star Wars” movies could be churned out to print money. A measly 6 months after the release of “The Last Jedi”, they released “Solo: a Star Wars Story”. While it was a good and completely underrated movie, it was one that absolutely no one wanted; further, it didn’t help matters that the controvery surrounding “The Last Jedi” was still raging. In the end, “Solo” bombed in theaters, and was the first “Star Wars” movie to do so. Wisely, Disney decided to pull back and cancel pretty much everything except 2019’s “The Rise of Skywalker”. More movies are being made, of course, but at the time of writing, they are all languishing in development.

It’s a problem when spectacle creep affects a series of movies, but what happens when it affects an industry?

If you haven’t noticed, Hollywood has pumped out movies that are exponentially bigger and flashier than they were in the 50’s and 60’s. Of course, audience tastes have changed, but their need for action and excitement have changed even more so, growing to possibly unsustainable levels. The stakes have to reach a limit somewhere, and we may have seen it.

In “Spider-man: Across the Spider-verse” (a very recent and very successful movie, in the event you somehow didn’t hear of it), the protagonist Miles Morales (voiced by Shameik Moore) is introduced to the titular Spider-verse. The idea is that each universe has a Spider-man like him, and they are connected to all of the other universes in the multiverse. The lives of each version of Spider-man are expected to follow an established pattern known as “the canon”: a young guy is bitten by a radioactive spider, Uncle Ben dies, the guy becomes a super-hero, and so on.

If events of the canon are disrupted– say, by dimension-traveling Spider-men like in this movie and the first one– there is a chance that the universe will break down and be totally annihilated. If that somehow wasn’t bad enough, there’s a chance that if enough universes are destroyed, it could set off a chain reaction where other healthy universes are destroyed with them. This reaction would keep multiplying until the multiverse collapses and all of Creation is obliterated.

Really, I’m not sure how you’re supposed to top that. I dare say that right there is the logical conclusion of spectacle creep. I don’t know how the sequel to “Across the Spider-verse” or anyone is going to try to beat that, but people will certainly get tired of seeing movies where the fate of all existence hangs in the balance.

Here’s my point: when dialing up the stakes and action, don’t forget to dial them back down from time to time so you don’t exhaust the audience. Part of that includes pacing yourself and not pumping out too many new installments in a series. Big, flashy fight scenes and multi-movie franchises are good, but make sure that the plot and the audience have some down-time between them. There’s no point in killing a golden goose, and trying too hard to increase the spectacle will surely do so.

That’s all, folks. Thanks for reading.

–Neal