SSC Film Studies

How important are film franchises

 For audiences and producers

I think that Film Franchises are extremely important for both audiences and producers. However there are both positives and negatives towards both Audiences and Producers.

Audiences now enjoy a more demanding experience; the sleeper curve theory explains that movies are becoming more mentally demanding, due to the lack of flashing arrows. Flashing arrows are parts of a story that reference earlier parts, in the story or franchise, the lack of these have made audiences smarter, because if you watch the last film in a franchise, Harry Potter for example, you won’t understand what’s happening. Therefore you will need to see the previous 6 films to understand the final one, and that takes patience. This is also useful for producers as the box office figures for Harry Potter never drop, as each film allows audiences to go on a journey, and every gets better every time. As the characters age, so does the audience; so people will want to see each and every one for their own experience. People will also go to see the franchise for a social experience. For example, I saw the first one with my mother and my uncle, when I was about 5-6, so after this I went to see the rest with my mum and my uncle.

Another example of audiences becoming smarter is the fact that some franchise films insult the intelligence of the audience; for example when I went to see Transformers 3, I noticed that Michael Bay, had copied and pasted a scene from another one of his films called the Island; and after I had seen this I had felt insulted, as he had thought, that the audience were too stupid to realise. Transformers 4: Age of Extinction, was the highest grossing film of 2014, one could say that the reason for this is that, audiences are not as smart as they seem, and they’ll go se the same films with the same plot over and over as long as a tiny detail has changed. However the audience isn’t to blame; Franchises are taking over, stagnating independent movie corporations, saturating the market and narrowing creativity in movies. We know this for a fact, as the top 13 highest grossing films in 2013 were franchises, and that the audience, if given the chance, would choose to see a more mentally demanding film such as interstellar or Inception. We also know this to be true, as these films are more sophisticated, but at the same time, have made millions. For example Transformers 4 made $100 million, but Inception had made a whopping $570 million.

A negative for producers, and franchises, is that if the first film of a franchise is terrible, no one will want to see the rest of the movies. Judge Dredd 1995, was a failure, and did no justice to the comic books at all, (not only in my experience, but for the Box office as well) so years later they decided to reboot the movie in 2012, and the movie was exactly to the comic books, and was a complete success, however, due to the previous film it didn’t do as well as they had expected, and the producers that were hoping to make a trilogy, couldn’t due to the lack of money gained, due to the previous film. But the company didn’t go bankrupt and stayed financially secure, due to synergy.

Synergy doesn’t always help producers, for example, when Disney made John Carter, it failed miserably and Disney lost control of potentially a billion dollar franchise, as the owners of the book took it back. And because the Movie was so terrible, no one knew that it was based off of a book, so no one wanted to go and read the book, the merchandise didn’t sell at all and Disney even made a John Carter ride that was eventually taken down as it was terrible. But this didn’t hurt Disney, it was more of a tiny speed bump, as Disney realised the importance of Franchise and went and bought Marvel Studios, and replaced the John Carter ride with a Marvel one, that is very successful.

Sometimes, Producers go out of business, due to a terrible movie, (Marvel were just lucky that they are one of the biggest companies in the world) The Golden Compass made by New Line Studios, who also made Lord Of The Rings, were eventually absorbed by Warner Brothers, because of the Golden Compass being a Box office flop. So when Warner Brothers absorbed their company, they saw that Lord Of The Rings was a huge hit, therefor they decided to make the Hobbit movies.