Ryan Reynolds’ newest big-screen hit is more than meets the eye. While first impressions of Free Guy rightfully cast it as a fun and carefree romp through video games and pop culture, it crystallizes a new type of movie genre that has been forming for decades. Both as an attempt to reach the video game audience plus a result of megacorporate mergers, Hollywood has birthed a new genre in the 21st Century: the metamalgamation. Free Guy is the most recent and quintessential example of a metamalgamation. The influences of its predecessors can be clearly seen and felt throughout the movie, and would one go back to watch the emerging archetypes of this genre one would see a definitive through-line from them to this.
Here is the definition of metamalgamation. First, a metamalgamation is a movie where a conglomeration of franchises mash together their properties on-screen for audience delight or acknowledgment. Second, it's where a secondary world is aware that its reality is semi or fully artificial and can interact with that knowledge.
The Prototypes
Deconstructing Free Guy, the viewer can see all the inherent ingredients of a metamalgamation. The essential traits and qualities of the genre have existed in movies for decades and can be detected as far back as the 80’s - possibly further. The early forms of metamalgamations were primarily proto-metas. As the genre developed there released a few proto-amalgamations. The most recent entries are true and pure metamalgamations in all its glory. The two streams break down as such: meta meaning when the character is self-aware that they are in an artificial world, and an amalgamation is when the corporate overlord uses all its toys in one property. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it represents the most important and emblematic movies of the metamalgamations development and synthesis. These movies are also direct influences on Free Guy in one way or another.
Proto-Metas
There is a scene in Free Guy when Guy implores Buddy to wear his glasses to see the game world but Buddy refuses. This is a callback to arguably the first proto-meta of the genre, John Carpenter’s They Live (1988). In it, Nada implores Frank to wear his sunglasses to see the invisible alien security forces that occupy the planet. Regrettably, Guy and Buddy don’t break into an epic six-minute fistfight like They Live but the kernel of meta is there. Nada and Frank discover that they live in an “artificial,” or manufactured reality. The exact same technique of how to witness the other world is employed in Free Guy via the sunglasses the Player Characters wear vs the Non-Player Characters who have no sunglasses.
TV’s Reboot (1994-2001) is very much like Free Guy. The world is separated by “the Users” and the NPCs. The characters are aware their world is a game and that there is a different reality outside of their own. When Guy is unable to push past an invisible boundary on the shoreline of Free City that is a direct call-out to the next proto-meta, The Truman Show (1998). Truman’s life is contained in a giant dome (that is really a soundstage) that uses a sea as its physical boundary.
The most obvious proto-meta is The Matrix (1999). It popularized the cinematic concept of a real world and an artificial one, and the main character’s ability to transit between them and manipulate one of them. In this case, the artificial world is a digital one – very much like Free Guy. The first mainstream movie to try and use video game concepts in the real world is 2009’s Gamer starring Gerard Butler. In it, Gerard Butler’s character (a real person, not a computer character) is “played” by a seventeen-year-old kid in a deathmatch competition.
A surprise underdog, Tron: Legacy (2010) proposes the idea of an AI code becoming a sentient life form, much like Guy’s transformation in Free Guy. Unlike Tron: Legacy’s Quorra (Olivia Wilde), Guy cannot escape Free City into the real world. The last notable proto-meta is more like Gamer than anything but is fully represented in Free Guy nonetheless, Edge of Tomorrow (2014). In Free Guy, Guy is tasked by Molotov Girl to level up before he can join her (even though she did not believe he would actually do it). Guy goes into a “live-die-repeat” cycle to learn about his new powers and to master the game he lives in.
Proto-Amalgamations
The proto-amalgamation category is smaller only because it is a more recent phenomenon, and it is a lot more complicated to pull off. The primary examples are movies where several separate properties are owned by a parent company and placed together in a movie for either nostalgic effect or for popular references, or as the grand design of a mega-franchise.
The first is a quick derivative of an idea that culminated two years later, 2010's The Expendables. Though Sly Stallone did not necessarily join the franchises of each main character – Rambo is not literally shoulder to shoulder with John McClane, the kernel of the amalgamation of franchises is unmistakable.
Wreck-It Ralph (2012) is the perfect example of a video game amalgamation. Ralph’s world is composed of a multitude of arcade game characters and levels, including the likes of Bowser, Doctor Eggman, and Street Fighter characters like Blanka and Chun-Li.
The foremost example of an amalgamation is The Avengers (2012). Phase One of the MCU was dedicated to sowing and reaping the purest and most celebrated example of an amalgamation of movie franchises anywhere. Although technically all the characters come from the same comic book universe/movie studio, it cannot be understated the impact this movie had on the world ever since (much to the detriment of the DC Extended Universe).
21st Century Metamalgamations
After all of that, things synergized into the first three true metamalgamations: The Lego Movie (2014), Ready Player One (2018), and finally Free Guy.
The Lego Movie blended the beloved toy line with the Warner Bros. catalogue of characters - and lent Free Guy its peppy tone. Ready Player One was a storm of characters and references from movies and video games, even incorporating The Shining (1980) as one of its main puzzle sequences much in the same way Free Guy is a heavy riff on Fortnite.
Shoutout to Zak Penn
A key figure in all of this is the screenwriter Zak Penn. His first work, The Last Action Hero (1993), gets a special mention as a proto-meta because of the dynamic between action star Jack Slater (Arnold Schwarzeneggar) and a young boy from the real world who crashes into Slater’s movie universe. Penn also wrote the story for The Avengers with Joss Whedon, and wrote the screenplays for both Ready Player One and Free Guy. Perhaps it is a particularity of his to enjoy playing with the idea of reality versus the make-believe?
Spoilers for Free Guy
The metamalgamation genre developed from studios responding to market trends, video games are a highly lucrative medium that is very influential on emerging pop culture, and from the growing conglomeration of intellectual property. The end battle between Guy and Dude has Guy ignite a lightsaber, wield Captain America’s shield, and Hulk smash Dude through a guardrail. All of that is thanks to Disney’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox in 2019 (who were developing Free Guy prior to the purchase).
It could be said that the genre will burn itself out fairly quickly, as how many pop-cultural references can be stuffed into a movie before the audience gets tired of the same old drivel? So far, three movies in, there could be at least one or two more blockbusters to finish off the run before it morphs into something else - the Nintendo movie is surely one – or before it goes dormant to accumulate more pop culture cache to unleash on the next generation of moviegoers. If Disney ever purchases Warner Bros. it is a certainty that a new Marvel DC Extended Cinematic Universe will occupy theaters for another decade or more. For now, Free Guy is the purest version of a metamalgamation available.