SSC Film Studies

How important are film franchises for producers and audiences?

Film franchises are highly important for producers and the fans due to a number of factors. In this essay I will highlight these factors for both categories (fans and producers).

Firstly, producers find franchises a good way to ensure that a film meets its potential financial wise. For example a film such as Spy Kids earned $197,692,062 worldwide at the box office, the producers made a great level of profit as the film only cost $35,000,000 to make. Because it earned so much at the box office, the film was given a sequel. However, as the film released little to no merchandise (no toys or games were created, the only merchandise released was the official soundtrack) the producers relied on the films success as their only form of security, luckily for them the high levels of profit allowed them to create a further two films in the original “Spy Kids” series (not including the 2011 film which focuses on the Wilsons as opposed to the Cortez family).

For the fans film franchises are important, as it’s their way to bond with their favourite characters. The audience are there when the characters are at they’re highest and they’re lowest, they become part of the adventure and hope that they succeed in their quest. Film fans also rely on film franchises to ensure that the story of their favourite characters lives on and when a film series reaches the end of its life cycle, the fans rely on it to supply closure (although sometimes the fans may feel like the closure is not worthy of the character as one member of film reviewing site “rottentomatos” believed that the final instalment in the Harry Potter series was disappointing and described it as being “130 minutes of unfocused, supernatural-themed sludge”)

Some would say that franchises are often repetitive and in todays world every generation has their own “type of film”, this is probably true as in the current generation of film (2010,2011,2012,2013,2014+) superhero films are a big theme, almost every superhero whether they be from Marvel or DC has been given a franchise of their own (The Avengers, Spider-Man, Iron Man, Thor, Captain America and Batman are merely some examples), this theme is still going on as in July 2015 Marvel are set to release a film for the superhero “Ant Man”. Another example of repetitive films from the current film generation would be “found footage” horror films such as Paranormal Activity; films like these exist because they exploit the small fears of the audience and due to the film appearing low budget, it causes the audience to think “what if this happened to me?”.

However some producers would argue that is the repetitiveness of films that cause franchises to be successful, this is due to the fact that audiences like repetition. An example would be again be the Spy Kids franchise, the first film focuses on Juni and Carmen Cortez discovering they are descendants of spies and have to save their parents from a corrupt scientist who lives in his own fantasy world. The second film was considered a completely different story and didn’t go down well with the audience (the film received $77,970,766 less than the first at the worldwide box office) so as a means of trying to save the franchise, the producers decided that the third film would be a similar premise to the first but focus on Juni attempting to save his sister who is trapped inside a game (fantasy dream world) which was created by a mad (could be considered corrupt) scientist, The Toy Maker whose sole plan was to escape his own game and wreck havoc on the world beneath him. By deciding to follow a similar story to the first film, the film was considered a box office success and earned $167,851,995 worldwide.