How important are film franchises to producers and audiences

How important are film franchises to producers and audiences?

Modern Hollywood work by horizontal integration, this allows them to make franchises where they sell the same product many times.

Looking at the figures from 2014 the US box office revenues were at $9.6bn, down almost 5% on 2013, according to Box office Mojo. The year was considered a flop there was only one film, Paramount Pictures’ Transformers: Age of Extinction, which surpassed $1bn global theatrical revenues.  Compared to 2013, which had two $1bn hit moves, both of which were franchises and four the year before. Seven of the top ten grossing movies globally in 2014 were sequels , there fore 70% of people choose to go watch a franchise film rather than a original movie. This just shows how important franchises are to producers as this is where they generate the largest profit, big budget franchise movies that generate so much revenue that they can support a studios entire year of production. Producers can see from the box office revenue that there is a massive demand for franchise movies.

Producers love franchises because when they work, they can be a licence to print money. Films now have a global box office, because of technology these films are shown all around the world, so the films need to attract a global audience. Studio profits now come increasingly from outside the US, in the likes of China and other countries. 20^th Century Fox X-men franchise realised that increase in demand, the first X-Men move generated $157,299,717 in US box office and globally made $296,339,717. The movie nearly doubled its profits worldwide; because of this the producers added more foreign characters to the cast, which attracted more of a global audience. The producer’s also decided to shoot the movies in different locations around the world, which is recognisable for a global audience and attracts more attention. This lead to the last movie X-Men: Days of future past generating $233,921,531 in the US but more than doubled these profits in the worldwide box office generating $748,121,534.

Since the first movie producers and studios have saw an opportunity to squeeze their success for all they are worth, increased the amount of merchandise sold worldwide opening up the opportunity to access the X-Men world outside the cinema. There has been an increase of video games, posters, action figures etc. this allows the audience access to expanded universes outside the film. It makes the audience more familiar with the characters, in Hollywood, familiarity breed’s success, not contempt. Franchises are important to audiences because they can look forward to seeing the story being expanded, audiences like being familiar with the characters and watching the characters expand.  Franchises form communities within audiences who all share the same love for movies like X-Men; therefore they will hold events, which generate profit for the producers. The audiences builds expectations for the movie, the producers can see this and give the audience what they want as they know it is a way of knowing that they will generate profit.

·      More pros

·      Cons to an audience

·      Repetition

·      Creates divisions among fans

·      May not meet expectations

·      Lack of creativity, lack of alternatives.

·      Producers cant release a original movie

·      Monopoly.