why franchises are important to the audience and producers

A franchise is an intellectual property involving the same central characters, setting and trademarks of an original idea. There are a lot of reasons why film franchises are important to the producer and the audience. First of all for all franchises to have any chance of being successful they have to be unique and offer the audience a new experience. An example of a successful film franchise is Star Wars, which at the time was unique and extremely popular making $27,000,000(including merchandise). However many have tried to follow in the same foot steps and quite frankly failed miserably, a perfect example of this would be John Carter, the biggest box office fail off time. Another reason why John Carter failed was due to its ambiguous trailer, which quite literally did not make any sense whatsoever and did not provide any reason why the audience should go and watch it. Walt Disney lost $200 million dollars on John Carter.
Another important factor on why film franchises are important to the producer and the audience is the use of horizontal integration, which is the process of expanding in to other sectors of one industry. This means that a company can produce one product and sell/promote it over a wide variety of platforms. For example The Walt Disney Company owns Walt Disney Pictures, Walt Disney Work Shop, Disney interactive studios, Disney Consumer Products, ABC, ESPN, Pixar, etc. This allows for the ability to share resources and products across many different formats. This is known as synergy. Horizontal integration is important to the audience as it allows the fans to connect further with the franchise weather this is being through video games, comics/novels, toys, merchandise, and theme parks. The reason why horizontal integration is important to the producers is that films don’t make the most amount of revenue anymore they are a gateway to a larger consumer point as most of the revenue form successful film franchises comes from merchandise such as toys, video games and theme parks. Once the audiences are ‘hooked’ to the franchise the film producers exploit it so they can get money of you even after the movie, allowing for several streams of revenue.
Ones the audience is hooked to a franchise and are connected to the film characters it is very important that the film produces make simple repetitive sequels with the a little bit as seen with the Harry Potter franchise. Too much can very often have a bad effect, as I will explain in the franchise Alien. Too start of the first Alien film grossed $104,931,801 the unique combination of genres was horror and science fiction. The ending left the film open to sequels and an update on a significant genre,. Alien had the main themes incorporated into the film such as fear of unknown, other and technology. The main characters were also very popular with the audience and overall it met the audience’s expectations. The sequel was called Aliens and this time it was sci-fi and action, the reason being was that it appealed to mainstream audiences. It also built on the previous story and was more polished than the first. And it ended on an open ending. So basically the first two franchises were really popular as they were both simple, however Alien 3 is when it took a turn for its worst, as it was very complicated. First of all there was new characters, as the old popular characters unexpectedly died which the audience immediately were not fond of. It also tried to hard to link back to the first one.