Cinema used to live happily with mystery. A story began where it needed to. The hero stepped into frame, the problem arrived, and the past stayed mostly off-screen. These days, that’s rarely enough. For almost every successful film or franchise, someone eventually asks the same question: what happened before this?
Hence the age of the prequel. Wicked reimagines Oz long before Dorothy enters. Fantastic Beasts rewinds the Wizarding World decades before Harry Potter. Star Wars has mapped out multiple eras “a long time ago”, stretching further and further away from the original trilogy while still involving its characters and conflicts. At first glance, this looks like simple franchise economics. Studios mine existing universes because it’s safer than starting from scratch. But the appeal of prequels touches something more. They work because they tap into how we think about stories, memory and ourselves.
Curiosity as a Story Engine
Part of it is curiosity. Humans automatically seek patterns. We like causes and consequences, and loose ends bother us. When a film hints at an old wound or a broken friendship, we become curious. So when a prequel arrives and promises to reveal how it all began, it scratches an itch that the original story created. The audience isn’t just being sold new content. We’re being offered completion.
Wicked leans into this. The Wicked Witch of the West becomes Elphaba, and the prequel invites us to re-watch The Wizard of Oz and see a different story underneath. The Fantastic Beasts franchise attempts something similar. It spins the Wizarding World of Harry Potter back to the 1920s and 1930s, with new characters while laying tracks that lead to Dumbledore, Voldemort and the conflicts we recognise. It offers us a thrill of recognition when something connects to the future. We dig through the past to watch events unfold, and to discover more of the narrative we fell for in the first place.
We constantly search for backstory in real life. Why a friend behaves a certain way and why we keep making the same mistake. We build origin stories to make the present feel less arbitrary. Films are no different. When Star Wars turned Darth Vader from an ominous figure in a mask into Anakin Skywalker, it wasn’t just adding lore. It was trying to make sense of the leap from human to monster. We want villains to have reasons, heroes to have flaws and institutions to have histories. The prequel promises to turn symbols into three-dimensional people. It doesn’t always work and sometimes mystery is more powerful. Still, the urge to know is hard to resist.
Nostalgia With a Twist
There is also a nostalgic dimension. Many modern prequels are not aimed at newcomers, but at those who grew up with the originals. Returning to the early days of a story world lets us revisit our own. They are not just settings. They are emotional landmarks. We’re a rewatch culture. We return to favourite films and series not just to be surprised, but to feel something familiar again.
Prequels and sequels are an extension of that impulse, a way of staying a little longer in a world we don’t quite want to leave. They let us postpone moving on, wrapping nostalgia in the shape of new stories. This is also shown in the gaming and casino world, for instance on Mega Riches online casino experience, and where we love new versions of our favourite games. A prequel gives us the illusion of going back, not only in narrative time but also in personal time. For a few hours, we can pretend the story isn’t over yet.
But the prequel is more than comfort. It can be a tool for re-framing. By shifting the point of view, it lets us question the assumptions baked into earlier films. Wicked does this with a classic fairy-tale. Other prequels choose side characters to follow, turning background figures into protagonists and asking what the main story looks like from the margins.
Of course, there are risks. A character that once felt mythic can shrink under the bright light of backstory. The promise of everything you didn’t know can turn into a disappointment if it’s a thin story.
Still, the form persists because it speaks a familiar language. We all engage in prequel-writing in our own lives. We replay conversations, revisit childhood memories, trace the moment when something started to go wrong. We build narratives to make our present selves make sense. Modern cinema, with its endless appetite for origin stories, is doing the same thing at a larger scale.
The pleasure isn’t only in watching history unfold on screen. It’s in feeling the ground shift under a story we thought we already understood and recognising that our own histories are just as open to reinterpretation.