How important are film franchises for audience and producers?

How important are film franchises for audiences and producers?

I think franchises are important because they make money. If a film is successful there are chances to produce merchandising and endorsements. For example Harry Potter. The Harry Potter franchise has games, toys, Lego and a theme park. I think this is to make the most money the film can make. It also keeps the franchise going in gaps between films. Franchises normally also have a existing fan base. This is easy for producers because your next film of the franchise already has a fan base so you don’t have to chase too much, however you do have to have some changes as the film will be boring. Fans of the franchise will stay with the franchise through a bad film.

The franchise of the ‘Alien’ films is a interesting one. The first film was a big success at the box office grossing over $203,000,000. This success was down to a ‘New Cinematic Experience’. This film was visually distinctive as the editing was so quick. It also was a success because it appealed to so many people. It was a hyper genre; it had sci-fi elements and also horror elements with the pace. Sci-fi was also in trend at this time with the rise of ‘Star Wars”. The alien was iconic, one of the reasons it was so iconic was so iconic was it only had 3 minutes of screen time in a 2-hour film. This made people want to see more of the alien so of course they made another film, a sequel called ‘Aliens’.

‘Aliens’ was bigger and better as the film has a revenge element, this would make us identify with the characters, and we know this because the tag line was ‘This time its war’. This was interesting because we would see a different side to the characters. This film also had action elements; this was the new thing about the film that made it appeal to more audiences, this would appeal to more of more people because this was the ‘golden age’ of action films with films like ‘Die Hard’ out. The real scary thing in this is also the pace.

As we know not every film is a success. Alien 3 really damaged the alien franchise’s reputation. This film didn’t bring anything new at all and was a slap in the face to Alien fans, this film had a prologue explaining that two of the main characters had died. This broke the expectations of the fans as these characters had become iconic of the film, as the two films were so successful. In ‘Aliens they kill multiple aliens, in this one they only defeat one, this is almost like a step back.

Alien 4 then come out. This was a massive risk to the studio as it was coming off the formula that Alien 3 damaged. This film didn’t bring anything new, there was another slap in the face to the audience because Ripley is said to be dead, after that the audience expected there to be a closure to the franchise, however Ripley was cloned. The audiences felt cheated and felt like they were treated like idiots.

A recent film called ‘Prometheus’ rescued this franchise. This was done by answering a huge enigma code about the famous ‘Space Jockey’ this is also iconic of the Alien franchise because the question was never answered. This film promised to give the answer and that’s why existing fans went to see it.  There were many spinoffs which kept the franchise alive.