How to Stop Imploding Your Media Franchise in Six Easy Steps
By Isaac Mooney
The goal of any business is to make money. Like the coffeehouses of the 17th century, modern-day entertainment businesses seek to sell a product (tv shows and film) to generate conversations around their product to then sell more of that product. If enough conversation is generated around these movies, sequels are made with the intent to generate more revenue and more conversation. Multiple sequels may lead to the development of a media franchise—a brand that attracts attention not by who works on the project, but the name of brand generates excitement on its own.
Unfortunately, many modern sequels have not done justice to their franchises and have created negative discourse about their subject matter, such that the franchise itself loses influence and therefore conversation relevance and revenue. Because I enjoy a good story, I’ve identified a few reasons why these franchises are failing—and therefore—not making money. I’d like to see these remedied for old and new properties alike.
1. Quit annihilating old characters
What makes a good character? Kenneth Burke argues that it’s identification, and I find myself agreeing with that more and more as I explore why I like certain characters. Why do I like Han Solo (Star Wars)? He’s a jerk, but he’s there for his friends when it matters. Why do I like Shawn Spencer (Psych)? He might be goofy when he should be serious, but he’s seriously goofy when it’s time to joke. I don’t like Solo’s jerkish attitude or Spencer’s always joking mannerisms, but I do like that both can lay back and set others at ease, Solo by always keeping an eye on those he cares for, and Spencer by always breaking tension with a joke.
It’s then frustrating when new additions to these properties take away the aspects of how I identify with them. Solo isn’t there for his friends in Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens. Instead, he goes back to the life of crime his friends had helped him get out of in the previous three instalments. Shawn Spencer is no longer the pinnacle jester in season 8. He’s replaced by nothing as they increase his goofiness, and no one takes him seriously, even when the script would normally place him at the heart of a dramatic moment.
This leads me to believe that companies are too focused on the concepts of characters rather than the developed stories they’ve had. By not acknowledging the change characters go through in previous installments (or giving bad reasons for the new way characters are portrayed (looking at you Rings of Power)), the audience feels a dissonance between their identification and what’s shown to them on screen.
2. Halt the sabotage of your new characters
While old characters have an issue of misidentification, new characters have the opposite problem where they have too little or no characterization to identify with. Finn the stormtrooper had a strong story arc that would have written itself had Disney let it. He was disenfranchised from the institution of the First Order as he was ordered to slaughter innocents. His journey of rediscovering himself and what he believed in was a fascinating concept that ended on the writing room’s cutting floor. Instead, what we got was a man who was still disenfranchised but went on silly adventures that meant nothing as he screamed the name of the main character.
Another flop of a character in recent media is the character Arondir from Rings of Power. In the first season, Arondir showed promise as an elf who swore himself to a human woman’s side as the enemy claimed Mordor. Between seasons, the female human, Bronwyn, had her role was cut because the actress didn’t return. Many different paths lay for the in-world character of Arondir as his love was killed off-screen. He could swear vengeance against the orc who killed her with a poison arrow. He could vow to show kindness in her name. He could take care of Theo, Bronwyn’s son. None of those are the path the writers had him take. Instead, he goes into the wilderness for an unknown reason to fight tangentially beside Galadriel—another elf. This could have been a powerful story beat for Arondir, being shown as driven by silent fury. Instead, he moves on, leaving Bronwyn to fade into the background after being one of the driving forces of that area of the plot without so much as a mention past “dead.”
These characters have so much potential! Instead, screen time is wasted on main characters who don’t have nearly as interesting of stories, so it doesn’t generate the types of conversations that fuel a franchise long-term. While there is plenty of fan-fiction of Finn and Arondir from their respective fandoms, those ideas are “what-if” types of identification rather than established actions taken by the characters.
3. Stop destroying your canon
“Consistency is key” is something I often hear when trying to reach goals. The same is true when trying to establish a franchise. If at one moment, I say the sky is red on the world, I can now build stories and craft mythos around why and how the world came to reflect a red sky. If, however, I say that the sky is green, it always has been green, and the red was just a cover for the green, I’m going to be disappointed. First, because the stories I now have about the red sky are called into question, and second because it simply wasn’t true. The sky wasn’t always green. It became green after someone in the writer’s room decided they didn’t like the color red. The same has happened with canon.
Canon relies on consistency to create identification. The name Skywalker is trademarked for that exact reason. If with the next Star Wars movie, Luke’s last name became Anderson, I would expect people to be confused and lose connection because there is nothing attaching them to the name Luke Anderson within the Star Wars franchise. While new connections can be made, Star Wars already made the decision to work with and make connections to the idea of Skywalker. Something similar—though not to that scale—occurred in reality with Disney’s The Acolyte tv series.
Anakin Skywalker was born without a father because Darth Plagueis tried to break the will of the living force. In response, the force decided to create a being that would eventually put an end to all experiments upon itself in the Skywalker bloodline. This established the idea that force birth was essentially an act of revenge and was unique to Skywalkers. The way The Acolyte uses force birth is simply to bring children into the world. There is no exploration of ramifications, no other effects of tampering with the living force, the show simply has two children appear from force birth to harken back to the idea that Anakin Skywalker was special, and they might be too.
To me, this is an abuse of canon. It takes an idea and doesn’t give it nearly enough thought with the story it tells to justify its inclusion outside of “the writers wanted to.” For those unfamiliar with Star Wars, this fails to generate positive conversation around the topic while also isolating established fans from your brand.
4. Cease the attack upon your audience
“In matters of taste, the customer is always right.” One of the worst things an entertainment business can do is fail to entertain. The next worst thing a business can do is blame the failed story on the audience that it’s trying to appeal to. We can all agree that “bigotry, racism, and hate speech” are an issue, but the moment you cast that net to spread across the full extent of your audience as the reason your story fails, you quickly isolate the very people you need to stay in business. Such was the way of The Acolyte, primarily actress Rebecca Henderson. There are absolutely people who didn’t like the story for political reasons, and there are people who will inflate a story to imply bad actors for clicks. However, the moment you tell me I’m a racist for not liking the story for entirely different reasons, I don’t want to spend time in your sphere of influence anymore. When more of your male fans feel that way than ever, your numbers are projected to fall as they just don’t care to tune in to the same message of a failed story.
One example of a failed movie that didn’t do this was the live action The Little Mermaid. For whatever reason, the movie didn’t make back its budget. It could be that Disney fans don’t want to see something that will eventually be on streaming services for “free.” It could be that the price of a ticket has nearly doubled since the 2010, so fewer people are able to enjoy the luxury of the big screen as often as before. Whatever the reason, there wasn’t an outpouring of vitriol or finger-pointing. The loss was taken in stride, and Disney now makes fewer live action adaptations to ensure they make money on their films rather than losing them. There was no blaming the audience for not liking a film that included a black actress just an acknowledgement of the shifting economics of entertainment.
5. Hit pause on boring or repetitive plots
John Campbell has a theory on the monomyth, where all stories follow the same basic plot. I reject this on its face as if every story must hit the twelve points in exact sequence, all stories would be like Star Wars, and I don’t want all stories to be Star Wars. The sequence of events, or plot, are moveable as the only thing that matters on matters of a good story is the emotional reaction you create in your audience. If you can’t create that connection (another type of identification), then the way your story is built likely is wrong. The best stories have different kinds of moments that make up the whole. Slow moments, fast sequences, serious drama, and goofy punchlines are among the types of scenes that can be delivered in movies, but they often aren’t used correctly.
Take Marvel movies. Often, the main character has a moment of levity to the extent that “funny” becomes a characteristic of that character. I would not, however, label the green monster fueled by rage and bitterness as funny despite there being humorous moments. The problem with the Hulk building that habit of being “funny” is that when he is expected to be serious, the audience waits for a punchline. The happened in Ant-Man when a father was reconnecting with his daughter, and before the full extent of the emotion could settle, Ant-Man ruins the moment with an awkward punchline. This deprives the audience of something called catharsis. Catharsis is the release of pent-up emotion, both good and bad, and it’s one of the reasons we like stories. It helps us build and release emotions quickly. If everyone is funny, then catharsis never completes, and we are held in emotional suspense.
6. Don’t fire when ready, just not ready to fire
Fifteen. Fifteen new tv shows and movies were added to the Marvel cinematic universe in phase four. Phase four ran from 2021 with Black Widow and ended in late 2022 with Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. You can find a full list break down of it in figure 4, but there was so much stuff to consume in such little time that most people haven’t seen half of it. Being a professed Marvel lover myself, I haven’t seen eight of those projects. Not just because they got panned at the box office, but I didn’t have time. When you have approximately fifty hours of new content for your audience to keep up with for an overarching storyline rather than an episodic structure, it becomes difficult to do as not everyone wants to spend every other Friday night watching a Marvel project.
For me, I fell behind and turned my attention elsewhere because I wasn’t entertained. There was so much coming at me that felt the same that I didn’t feel the need to watch the plot unravel as much as I wanted to read the SparkNotes afterwards. This is becoming increasingly common as lives get busier. Sitting with something for its full duration is only done on podcasts that can be paused and sped up to match our conveniences. Movies that demand a rigid two hours from us become more difficult to stay with, especially if we feel like the time we invest in them doesn’t feel like a profit.
Conclusion
While my tastes are not everyone’s tastes—and I know a few people who are satisfied and even in love with the current projects from Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and Marvel—I can’t help but feel a disconnect between the stories I loved growing up with and the stories being told now. I’d love to see these ideas implemented if only for a few years on a few movies to see if the magic return to the films that once enchanted millions. I fear that the box office count will not be as kind to these stories as my suggestions, so I hope they can be used for what they are worth.
About the author
Isaac Mooney is a senior at Utah Valley University. He may be young in age, but he's
a crotchety old man at heart. He enjoys playing Magic: the Gathering on the weekend,
video games on the weekdays, and staying stuck in the first three chapters of every
book he writes at night.