Summer movie season is fast approaching – or well under way depending on how you look at things. The Fate of the Furious may have set box office records, but critical consensus is the 15-year-old franchise is running out of gas (it suffers from the lowest Rotten Tomatoes score since the fourth chapter). In the coming months we’ll see sequels to 10-year-plus franchises, such as Pirates of the Caribbean, Transformers and Cars. This provides more than enough fodder for laments about how Hollywood is out of ideas.

But what if we took a different approach this summer? What if we viewed the Hollywood franchise era in which we live as an opportunity to reflect on the passage of time? Richard Linklater (rightfully) receives plaudits and awards for experimenting with the concept of time in films like Boyhood which truncates 12 years of filming into a three-hour movie or the Before Sunrise trilogy in which we revisit the same couple played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy every nine years.

But when is the last time we considered anything other than the commercial implications of Michael Bay making five Transformers films in 10 years? What about the effect of seeing Shia LaBeouf’s Sam Witwicky go through a series of painful job interviews in Transformers: Dark of the Moon with the memory of seeing roughly high school-aged Shia LaBeouf struggling to fit into his high school scene four years earlier. Isn’t it more painful to think, this kid just doesn’t fit in when we’ve seen him struggle with high school, college and the job force? OK, so Bay’s oeuvre about battling robots probably won’t be as profound as the works of Linklater or Michael Apted’s 7 Up documentaries, but what’s to say there isn’t something there if we choose to look for it? Hollywood marketing may bank on convincing viewers nothing’s changed – “Come on, it will be just like last time!” – but the impacts of sociopolitical climate, advances in technology and good old-fashioned ageing inherently indicate that it will have. Let’s celebrate that.

Take Bridget Jones’s Baby; a sequel that was by all accounts a creative and commercial disappointment. In one of the film’s more enjoyable scenes, Bridget reconnects with her friends played by Shirley Henderson, Sally Phillips and Julian Rhind-Tutt at a funeral. You can sense the performers’ excitement revisiting these characters 15 years later. Which gives the viewer one of the film’s few joys – the approximation of reconnecting with friends several years down the line. It’s a maddeningly unnecessary scene from a plot standpoint (rendered such by the film’s final shot), but isn’t the emotional response, albeit temporary, more important than the plot?

Matt Damon in Jason Bourne. Photograph: Allstar/Universal Pictures

Consider Jason Bourne – another sequel deemed unnecessary by most. But saying it’s unnecessary does a disservice to the impact of Matt Damon playing this character over the course of 13 years. The person we encounter in the fifth film has grown, his wounds have deepened and Matt Damon’s physicality reflects it. Look at the posters side by side and marvel over youthful oblivion contrasted with gruff, weathered world-weariness.

Rewatching The Bourne Identity after seeing the sequels we are rewarded with a deeper experience by knowing that Bourne eventually ends up a bare-knuckle brawler in a dead-end desert. We also know the backstory of his cold-blooded mercenary status before we first meet him floating in the ocean. Now, when Damon appears in a crisp white shirt and a trademark grin at the end of The Bourne Identity, the moment feels less like a cheesy, studio-enforced happy ending and more like a melancholic note on how fleeting this sense of normalcy will be for the character. The impact of a multi-film character arc is more pronounced in something like the Before Sunrise trilogy, but it’s not absent from the Bourne films.

Cinematic universes are top of mind for studio execs (a Fast & Furious spin-off featuring The Rock and Jason Statham was just announced) and the Bourne franchise is one of the more artful accomplishments in this regard. Another pleasure from rewatching the first film is catching a seemingly throwaway line from Brian Cox at the end of the movie referencing Operation Blackbriar – which becomes a central plot point in The Bourne Ultimatum. Watching the first film now, the line of dialogue is an Easter egg for fans. You can either marvel at how the film-makers planted the seed for sequels from the get-go, or applaud the ingenuity of future screenwriters for reverse-engineering plot details.

This summer, we encounter Johnny Depp approaching a similar milestone as Damon: 14 years as Captain Jack Sparrow. Will the performance or the film offer the same detail of complexity as Jason Bourne? Heavy makeup can create the sense that Depp hasn’t aged a day but each outing increasingly feels like “work” compared with how effortless it felt in the first film. The same might be said for Robert Downey Jr, who reprises his Tony Stark role for the seventh time in July’s Spider-Man: Homecoming. Presumably, his presence in the Spider-Man reboot is rooted in fan service and goosing the box office. But could carryover of Tony Stark’s ethical dilemma in Captain America: Civil War become a plot point? Even if the film-makers elide the happenings of last summer’s bloated blockbuster, how can we not associate Tony’s tutelage of Peter Parker as insurance in the face of a fractured Marvel hero universe.

Outside of live action, Cars offers an opportunity to analyze advances in computer technology. In 2006, Cars arrived as the pinnacle of computer animation. But go back and watch the final race scenes on Blu-ray and the crowd shots look increasingly like a PlayStation 2 cut-scene. The first Cars felt very much like an appeal to the US red states while the Cars 3 teasers seem less about tried and true values and more of a reflection of self-automation in the vehicle industry.

Which of this summer’s sequels will best leverage franchise film-making’s ability to capture change over long periods of time? Time will tell. The one thing we know for sure is that the major studios’ predilection for franchise fare isn’t changing anytime soon with Marvel and DC movies slated through 2020. Indies aren’t immune either, with this year’s Trainspotting sequel a potential sign of things to come. So, let’s see this summer as a turning point where franchise films take on a new subtext and meaning, and continue to evolve past their opening weekend, even if the studios want us to think nothing has changed.