The midquel is one of the stranger inventions in franchise filmmaking. Unlike a prequel, which travels backwards to an origin, or a sequel, which moves forward to new consequences, the midquel plants itself in the middle of a story audiences already know. It exists in the gap. Its job is to fill that gap with something meaningful enough to justify the ticket price, the runtime, and the emotional investment of a fanbase that already knows how the story ends on both sides.
Done well, the midquel expands a world without disrupting it. Done poorly, it cheapens what came before. Most fall somewhere between those two outcomes, which is exactly why the form keeps producing arguments about whether it should exist at all.
What a midquel actually is
The term doesn't appear in most studio style guides. Hollywood uses it loosely, and different fans draw the line differently. The working definition is a film or series set during the events of a parent story, rather than before or after them. Rogue One (2016) is the clearest large-scale example: it sits in the hours immediately before Star Wars: A New Hope, filling in the theft of the Death Star plans that the opening crawl mentioned in 1977. Solo (2018) is a looser case, covering Han Solo's earlier life before the original trilogy but structured around events the audience already knew were coming.
Television has used this format more liberally. Better Call Saul began as a prequel to Breaking Bad but gradually incorporated midquel elements, running alongside and then beyond the parent story's timeline. It's one of the few examples where the format worked so well the spin-off is now considered equal to, if not better than, what it came from.
Why studios keep making them
The commercial logic is straightforward. An established franchise carries built-in audience awareness and emotional attachment. A new film set inside that world starts with more goodwill than an original property starts with from zero. The marketing is cheaper because the imagery, the logo, the character faces already mean something to millions of people.
There's also a storytelling argument, though it's thinner. Franchises with large, detailed worlds often contain genuine gaps worth exploring. Not every gap is a story, but some are. Rogue One worked because the rebellion's sacrifice in stealing the Death Star plans was emotionally real and narratively complete, even though the audience knew the outcome. The tension came not from whether the heroes would succeed but from understanding the cost of that success. That inversion of dramatic irony is one of the few tools the midquel format has that no other format does.
West Melbourne Studios works with clients who produce franchise-adjacent content across both film and digital formats, and the challenge is always the same: an audience that already knows where you're going is harder to hold than one that doesn't. That constraint shapes every creative decision, from pacing to character framing.
The creative risks the format always carries
The first risk is foregone conclusion. If the audience knows a character survives, sequences designed to threaten that character lose their grip. Directors work around this by focusing on emotional stakes rather than physical ones, or by centring the jeopardy on supporting characters the audience hasn't met. Both approaches require careful construction. Without it, the film feels like it's going through motions it can't fully commit to.
The second risk is canon contamination. Every detail a midquel introduces becomes part of the official record. A character's backstory, a technology's origin, a relationship's early history: once a midquel establishes these, they constrain every future story. Writers working on later instalments have to navigate around what the midquel said. This is manageable when the midquel is well-written, and a genuine problem when it isn't.
The third risk is fan service as a substitute for story. Midquels are especially vulnerable to this because they exist in a space where fans already care deeply. Callbacks and Easter eggs feel rewarding in the moment but don't constitute a narrative. A film built entirely from references to its parent story is a highlight reel with a budget, not a film.
The craft decisions that carry a midquel past these risks are similar to those that carry any film: strong characterisation, a clear central question that isn't already answered, and cinematography that gives the world a texture distinct from what came before. The art of cinematography matters here more than in most sequels, because visual distinction is often the fastest way to signal that this story has something new to offer, even inside familiar territory.
When it works: the case of Rogue One
Rogue One remains the most-studied example of a midquel working at scale. Director Gareth Edwards and cinematographer Greig Fraser gave the film a visual grammar that differed sharply from the main saga: handheld movement, tighter lensing, a grittier palette. The film felt like a war film inside a space opera franchise. That distinction gave it authority. Audiences weren't watching a retread; they were watching a different kind of story about the same world.
The screenplay, credited to Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy, made the smart choice to centre the drama on a new character, Jyn Erso, whose emotional arc was entirely self-contained. Her story had a beginning, a middle, and an end that didn't depend on what happened in A New Hope. The connection to the parent film came through the mission, not the protagonist. That structural choice gave the film room to breathe and gave audiences something to mourn that wasn't already predetermined.
When it fails: the cost of misreading the format
Solo is instructive for different reasons. The film covers Han Solo's youth and early career. Both are genuinely interesting topics in theory. The problem was that Solo treated every major reveal as an Easter egg, spending energy explaining the origin of the Kessel Run, Han's surname, the Millennium Falcon, and the friendship with Chewbacca in ways that reduced mythology to mechanics. By the end, the film had answered questions nobody was asking urgently and had left the characters exactly where the audience already knew they would be.
The commercial result was a rare underperformance for the Star Wars brand. The creative lesson is that explaining beloved details rarely improves them. Mystery is part of what makes iconic characters iconic. A midquel that strips the mystery away in pursuit of completeness tends to diminish rather than expand.
What the format demands from filmmakers
The midquel forces filmmakers to answer one honest question before production begins: what does this story have that the parent story doesn't? Not which gaps does it fill, but what does it add that nobody has felt before? If the answer is a list of revelations and callbacks, the film is in trouble. If the answer is a genuinely new emotional perspective, a character whose interiority hasn't been explored, or a conflict that reframes what the audience thought they already understood, there's a real film to make.
Sound and music carry a particular burden in this format. A score that borrows too heavily from the parent film reads as nostalgia without argument. The decisions a composer makes about when to echo familiar themes and when to establish new ones directly affect whether the film feels like its own thing or like an expensive tribute act. The same principle applies to sound design: a world that sounds exactly like the parent film is a world that hasn't grown. The role of sound design in establishing identity is rarely more consequential than in franchise work, where the audience arrives with strong sonic expectations already formed.
Streaming has accelerated midquel production across television, where limited series formats make the gap-filling exercise easier to justify. A six-episode series can expand a single narrative thread from a feature film without needing to carry a full theatrical story on its own. Whether that produces better midquels or just more of them is still an open question. The format's commercial appeal isn't going away. Its creative demands aren't either.