Building a shared cinematic universe is difficult, but that hasn't stopped Hollywood from trying, and trying, and trying again. Once Marvel proved that interconnected stories spread across multiple films was a recipe for box office dominance, everyone started giving it a go. But few were successful, and none managed to rival the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which remains the biggest box office franchise of all time.

For a while it looked like yes the John Wick franchise had a thing or two to teach the connected universe building industrybut the abysmal TV show Continental confirmed what most of us surely knew: that Keanu Reeves was the real draw all along. Universal's planned Dark Universe also went off with a whimper before it really had a chance to get off the ground, while Warner Bros. the ill-fated DC Extended Universe wrapped up in embarrassing fashion in 2023 with a string of box office hits.

But none of this punishes the industry. James Gunn and his DC studio are gearing up to try to reintroduce audiences to a new shared DC timeline, with The Superman trailer reveals not just a movie, but a whole new universe. Elsewhere, the guy who turned Winnie the Pooh into a nightmarish perversion of the original vision of A.A. Milne also threatened to make a series of films in the "The Twisted Universe of Childhood" which will similarly distort other beloved figures of innocence. There are several others horror films quietly build their own shared universes.

But why? Is this all in pursuit of some kind of higher artistic vision that can only be facilitated by stuffing movies with Easter eggs for other movies? Well, according to "Logan" director James Mangold, who also helmed the new Bob Dylan biopic "A Complete Unknown," shared universes are not only too widespread, they represent the death of storytelling.

James Mangold's Logan is still being heralded as the kind of cerebral superhero movie that Marvel Studios could never hope to recreate. The 2017 film, which belonged to 20th Century Fox (now 20th Century Studios is following Disney's acquisition of Fox in 2019) list of Marvel films, featuring Hugh Jackman's hero as a tortured and weary renegade, with Mangold borrowing from classic movies to provide 'Logan' became a real differentiator among superhero movies. Adding to the underdog status was the fact that the film had a cliffhanger ending that wasn't just designed to set up future outings based in the same universe - which seems to have been of the utmost importance to Mangold.

The director talked about the importance of standalone stories about Rolling Stone while promoting "A Complete Unknown" — his second musical biopic after 2005's "Walk the Line," which featured Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash. Asked if he'd ever considered bringing Phoenix back for a Dylan biopic, the director immediately dismissed the idea with blunt words.

After being told that "people were kind of hoping ('Complete Unknown') would become a cinematic universe, a multiverse situation - a Joaquin Phoenix return," (who exactly was hoping for this remains unclear), Mangold reacted with scathing condemnation. of the concept of a cinematic universe. "I don't like multi-movie universe building," he said. “I think that's the enemy of storytelling. The death of storytelling. People are more interested in the way the Legos connect than the way the story plays out in front of us.

A Complete Unknown may be a safe but enjoyable Bob Dylan biopicbut it's also not entirely typical of the genre. First of all, the film is not a retelling of Dylan's life from the cradle to the never-ending tour, instead focusing on the period between 1961 and 1965. ") in that it never tries to explain its subject. Dylan ends the film with as murky a past as he began, and that's really the thematic center of James Mangold's feature. At one point, Timothee Chalamet's Dylan even argues with his girlfriend Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), who claims to know nothing about her musician partner despite the fact that he has been living with her for some time. "People create their own pasts," Dylan says at the height of their argument. "They remember what they want and forget the rest."

Whatever you think of A Complete Unknown, then, it's onto something. It's about reinvention, the delicate, nebulous nature of the past and how we tell ourselves and others stories in an attempt to define our existence. Whether or not it succeeds in questioning these ideas is, of course, up to the viewer. But more importantly, this is what Mangold means when he talks about the death of storytelling. When a movie exists to sell other movies in the shared universe, it stops being about anything other than that. It's not a story. As the director went on to tell Rolling Stone:

"For me, the goal is always, 'What is unique about this film and these characters?' It doesn't make you think of some other movie or some easter egg or something, which is all an intellectual act, not an emotional act, you want the movie to work on an emotional level.

Of course, shared universes need not be as meaningless as Mangold declares. The Spider-Verse movies are proof that the concept of multiverses and shared timelines can directly inform innovative storytelling. With that in mind, it's kind of tragic to think about how the concept of a shared universe was so quickly embraced by the Hollywood machine, drained of its narrative potential and turned into a marketing tool. Let's hope the latest Spider-Verse film and its new directors remind us all that shared universes don't have to be so hard.