What's hilarious to me is that Hollywood ALREADY has a cautionary tale, a recent one, about what happens when you take too long to make another movie in a franchise.

Pic fucking related. Remember when Daniel Craig was supposed to be "young" and "inexperienced" as James Bond? That lasted for two movies, really one movie (Casino Royale) and a mishmash that's not quite a full film (Quantum of Solace). Then, because of the writers' strike at the time, Eon Productions kept taking longer and longer to make the third Craig film.

By the time they finally got around to it, more than five years had passed, and Craig had aged like shit. They were forced to start doing stories where Craig was a creaky old veteran Bond, starting with Skyfall, then with Spectre, and then with No Time To Die where they unceremoniously killed him off.

Craig's era of Bond never felt right, in part because it started with them trying to do one thing--a young, fresh, inexperienced Bond--and then them having to pivot to something totally different: an old, washed-up, wily veteran Bond. They don't fit together tonally.

And Reeves and Pattinson are about to do the same thing with their Batman universe, for the same reason: they've just taken too fucking long to make the next film.