ABSTRACT
A central facet of the film industry since 1980 has been its orientation around the production of blockbusters and the development of media franchises. For Paul Grainge, the concept of the franchise “denotes the partnership between Hollywood, as the owner of a business system offering a branded product or service, and the network of individuals licensed to sell that brand in accordance with the system’s regulation of trademarks, logos and intellectual property rights.”2 I will develop the concept of franchise along similar lines, taking it to designate those media properties designed to encompass several films and to produce significant ancillary income from product merchandising, such as books, music, toys, costumes, and games. Franchises typically include extensive media crossover into television, video games, books, amusement park rides, and websites that extend the story world in significant ways into those other domains. The concept of franchise thus also presumes what Henry Jenkins calls “convergence,” “the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want.”3 If the cinematic event in particular and the film commodity in general remain indispensable to the definition of the franchise, the franchise is not reducible to the film even construed in the broadest sense. As Grainge notes, “[I]n economic terms, film has become less important as a discrete commodity than as a brand platform that can be transfigured across industries and cultural fields.”4 He adds:
[I]f . . . theatrical film is one long marketing device for a range of ancillary products (videos, DVDs, soundtracks) extra-textual experiences (theme park rides, video games) and non-filmic consumables (toys, soft drinks, fast food), then branding has become the lynchpin of a new gestalt of “total entertainment,” central to a consolidated media moment transforming the status of motion picture as commodity and aesthetic object.5
