How important are film franchises for audiences and producers?

I think that film franchises are very important for audiences and producers. It is important for audiences as they now enjoy more demanding experiences and franchises offer this, for example Harry Potter has gained a large amount of profit and has gradually increased it profits and if they were to understand the 8^th film they would have to watch one through seven which requires the audience helps make the experience of the 8^th film more enjoyable. Franchises allow the audience to ‘go on a journey’ with the characters and see them develop, for example again with Harry Potter it starts off being about fitting in school and dealing with bullies but gradually becomes about relationships and love triangles, becoming more complex has the movies go on. This meets the audience’s desires, as they want to see the characters evolve and grow with them. They enable the audience to engage with the story outside of just the cinema, such as games, the books, the theme park and merchandise. Franchises can become a social experience for the audience, for example I watched the Harry Potter films with my dad each time they came out on DVD and then started watching them in the cinema up to the fifth film in the franchise, and continued to watch them in the cinema until they ended. This became almost like a tradition for us and it shows that film franchises are a great way for people to bond and socialise as it is something they are familiar with and can discuss, due to them all being on a level playing field in terms of what they know about the story.

Franchises have negatives to them, for example they reduce the potential choices on offer as more and more studios have started to make franchise films.  In 2013 fourteen of the top 30 grossing films were franchise films, in 2014 it rose to sixteen. Though this increase is small it is gradually becoming larger and because these films are making such a large profit the producers will keep producing them, this is bad for audiences, as they will end up getting the same choices again and again which will eventually become stagnant. Franchise films have been criticised for insulting the intelligence of the audience. For example Michael Bay had previously worked on a film called The Island and in that film there was a scene which had the front of a car being crush, Bay took that exact scene and had the CGI department of the film he was working on at the time, Transformers 3, and had them make a Robot crush the front of the car instead of the debris in The Island. This was also done to another small portion of the same scene with a first person perspective from the car driving through some smoke. This was all done to save time and money while riding on the hopes that no one would notice, this insults the audiences’ intelligence as people did find out and it infuriated them. Films are becoming more predictable than ever before and we are being given less choice because of this. For example transformers 3 became the number one grossing film of 2011 so naturally they will want to make a sequel in order to gain a large profit, Transformers: Age of Extinction came out 3 years later as expected.  Sometimes in order to fully enjoy/ understand a film it is required of the audience to catch up on the story by watching the previous films. For example The Avengers had been built up from a variety of other films and there are certain key elements from that film that are present in previous films such as Thor and Captain America.