Status Quo Is God/Film

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of Status Quo Is God in Film include:

  • Every unplanned movie Sequel.
  • Star Trek II the Wrath of Khan features this; in the original episode "Space Seed," the evil Khan learns his lesson, and goes away with a happy ending; meanwhile in the first Star Trek movie, many developments are made to characters and technology. However in this sequel, Khan is back to his evil old self, and likewise most other things are back pretty much the way they were before. To be fair, though, a lot of crap happened to him in the intervening time, like the planet he was exiled to being knocked out of its orbit, and his wife dying from one of the planet's native creatures. It's kind of understandable that he'd go nuts again.
    • This goes double for Star Trek III: The Search For Spock; in Star Trek II, Spock died, and Kirk's son was introduced, along with his terraforming "Genesis Device;" however at the end of the movie, all of these are undone by the plot: Spock is brought back to life, Kirk's son is killed, and the Genesis Device is no more.
      • Star Trek III also introduced "trans-warp drive," and destroys the Enterprise. In Star Trek IV... well, you get the picture.
  • Godzilla will always come back to either: A) fight other (possibly Eviler Than Thou) monsters; B) destroy a major city (usually Tokyo), or C) both. No matter how many times the JSDF tries to stop him. Even when Godzilla IS defeated, he manages to come back in the next film.
    • For the first sequel, it was another Godzilla, just according to keikaku and predicted by Dr. Yamane in the first Godzilla film. For the rest of the Showa series, he was never permanently defeated, but merely came back throughout one loose but traceable continuity. Other times (like the Return of Godzilla and most of the Millennium films) it was an alternate continuity, sometimes even altering the in-universe events of the films they included. This case could be more Strictly Formula than Status Quo Is God.
      • The real Status Quo of Godzilla films is that Humanity is all but helpless in the face of a Kaiju rampage. Just about any weapon they devise to stop them will either fail or be destroyed by the end of the movie. One of the few times this was averted, that particular continuity/series ended with that movie.
    • Comic book writers like to subvert this. In Planetary the Four kill off the Kaiju in their crusade against weird, and in Marvel Civil War it was explained that the arrival of Japanese Superheroes allowed Japan to put an end to its Kaiju attacks. Moral of the Story: the way to kill off a status quo is with another status quo.
  • Before The Dark Knight Saga you could expect all Batman movies to have the main villain dead, with Gotham saved. And Bruce Wayne would always get a new girlfriend, only to end up single again for the next movie.
  • High School Musical has a song all about this. As described by The Agony Booth. This results in Sharpay possibly being more empty-headed and bitchy by the second movie and again in the third one.
  • James Bond never changed his name or call number, even after 40 years of the original (Dr. No-Die Another Day) continuity, countless adventures, and five different actors. Never received any permanent scars or disabilities from battle wounds. Never married (for long), fathered children, caught a disease, or even gets a morning-after call from the Bond Girls he slept with in previous movies. Any new techno-toys Q gave him would vanish before the next movie.
    • This only really started with the Roger Moore films. The Connery films (and Lazenby's sole outing) had a loose story arc revolving around Bond taking on Blofeld and SPECTRE.
  • Indiana Jones: see James Bond. He finds lost treasures, and they're never heard from again. The Lost Ark? After its display of power, The Government packs it away (and likewise nothing bad happens, despite that in the Bible, anyone who kept the Ark from the rightful Israelites would suffer God's wrath in various forms). The Holy Grail? Trapped behind a cursed barrier. The Crystal Skull? Reunites with its body, and flies off to space... and another dimension.
  • Count Dracula always comes back.
  • The Ice Age movies feature a shrew perpetually in pursuit of an acorn and destined to never catch it. He sometimes successfully manages to grab it but always loses his grip and ends up losing it and getting frozen in the end, just out of reach of the acorn. In the third movie, he finds a love interest and secures the acorn, but ends up being separated, loses the acorn, and gets frozen in an iceblock again, presumably not to be thawed until Ice Age 4.
  • An in-story example: In The Matrix trilogy, it's revealed that the humans and machines have gone through several cycles of rebellion and war, always returning to the status quo in between.
  • X Men the Last Stand movie seemed like this. During the movie, several characters died (including Professor X!) and many more were "cured" of their powers. Two scenes at the end hint that 1. Xavier downloaded his mind into a catatonic body and 2. Magneto and the others are recovering their powers, meaning the only changes that stick are Scott and Phoenix's deaths. And since Phoenix came back once...
  • The premise for Batman: The Movie and the Batman TV Series is that that incarnation of Batman only is useful to fight supervillains (and nothing more). He cannot change anything more in his world. Robin's idea to better the world by making a Freaky Friday Flip with the bickering United World Organization security council is quickly rejected by Batman. Then when this happens… the security council is still bickering between themselves, but each one of them is bickering in a different idiom. Batman realizes that Status Quo Is God and he and Robin going out inconspicuously through the window.
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