2.2-Fundamentos jurídicos:

The term franchise is often used unrelated to cinema and is a term most associated with the field of business: ‘most franchise agreements grant the franchisee the right to use one or more of the franchisors trademarks in connection with certain goods and services’ (Barkoff and Selden, 2008: 4). Franchising means that authorisation is granted by a government or company to an individual or group which enables them to carry out certain commercial activities, for example acting as an agent for a company’s products. It is mainly used to describe businesses such as McDonald’s which look to extend their corporate footprint. This is similar to media licensing where film rights-holders extend production responsibilities for tie-ins such as videogames or comic books. It is an important connection to draw between the two business models because there is a large amount of literature on organisational communication, business and other non-media related fields that have written about the social dynamics of the structures of franchises. According to Henry Jenkins in a recent interview, ‘retail franchisors and franchisees have not always worked in unison; instead, franchisors are always working to assert their authority over independent outlets they cannot fully control, and franchisees seek to assert their local agency in a larger corporate culture’ (Jenkins, 2014). Jenkins reflects on the way the notion of the franchise has shaped how the production of media entertainment has been imagined, because the franchising metaphor also shapes the audiences’ critical approach to these entertainment brands. As Jenkins states, ‘calling something a “franchise” is not a neutral declaration: it prompts us to think about the media in the same terms that we think about McDonald’s. There is a recognition of the industrial basis for that culture and its hyper-commercial, systemic mode of multiplication and maintenance over time’ (2014). This often comes with an implied critique,

whereby to acknowledge something as a franchise product suggests that its existence is based on a calculation of the market more than a form of creative expression.

The term franchise gradually shifted from being used solely in the field of business to being included in the discussion of certain films. The first recorded instance, in relation to film, was in 1992 with the release of the Disney sequel Honey, I Blew Up the Kid in 1992: ‘The ‘Honey’ franchise is Disney’s contemporary equivalent of its successful 1960s special effects comedies featuring Fred MacMurray’s absent-minded professor’ (Variety cited in Johnson, 2013: 54). This suggests that franchise discourse began to have purchase in the early 1990s and emerged into far more significant usage by the end of the decade. Media theorist Derek Johnson does a search for every available full-text document from 1991 to 2008 which refers to a franchise, eighteen thousand and seventy-nine articles were returned from Variety and from Hollywood Reporter. Of the ninety-three Hollywood Reporter articles returned for 1991, for example, only twenty-eight significantly referred to media content such as, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Saved By the Bell, America’s Funniest Home Videos and Batman, as franchises. The remaining majority referred to franchising in the context of distribution, regulating cable franchises, growing Blockbuster video franchises, and media licensing deals signed with fast food franchises. From 1992 onward franchise discourse began growing and by 1993 that discourse centred more on the production content like Star Trek, Terminator, Mr. Bean, Look Who’s Talking, Matlock, Entertainment Tonight, Today, NBC Nightly News and the Super Bowl than franchise regulation or niche network identities. The balance of franchise discourse shifted towards describing the ongoing production of content across a range of genres and industrial contexts. There were one hundred and fifty-seven total discussions of media franchises across both publications in 1992, but that ballooned to five hundred and thirty-two in 1993, and reached more than a thousand by the year 2000. The initial imagination of multiplied media production as and through franchising certainly may have occurred prior, but the expansion evidence here suggests that it came into discursive dominance in the media industries in the 1990s. So, although we could look today at something like the Star Trek television series and the films connected to it and consider it a franchise, and even look back to the 1960s and 1970s to uncover the origins of that franchising, it was not until the 1990s that expansive productions like these were rendered widely legible as franchising in both industrial and popular discourse. The significance of this difference comes from the realisation that media industries have been worked upon by this discourse; and this particular cultural work has its own effects (Johnson, 2013: 56).

According to film critic Tim Dirks, franchise films ‘normally have at least three significant films in the series, [and] usually have a combined gross box-office (domestic) revenue income (adjusted for inflation) of at least $450 million’ (Dirks, 2015). There is a distinction to make between sequels and franchises as sequels exploit the ability for an extension of narrative and can be found in all media including plays and books. When the sequels become a part of a franchise is when the series becomes a marketable brand or is seen to be an event, such as indicated in the trailer for The Hunger Games Mockingjay Part Two: ‘The event the world has been waiting for’. A brand is more sustainable than a series of sequels as once the brand has been established and turned into a consumer franchise the brand image takes a long time to decay. This is because the image is maintained more by the audiences’ familiarity with the usage of the brand than by external marketing stimuli. Professor of advertising John Philip Jones elaborates on this by arguing how the brand can be strengthened through advertising strategies:

The image of a brand can never be improved by promotions – a matter directly related to the stability of the consumer franchise. There is a vicious circle sometimes described as “promotion-commotion-demotion”. On the other hand, the image is very often strengthened by consumer advertising. This reinforcement represents a long-term effect in addition to short-term sales generation. It leads to an increasing perceived differentiation of the advertised brand from rival brands. This differentiation, in turn, reduces their ability to substitute for it, thus leading to greater stability of consumer demand for the advertised brand (Jones, 2000: 80)

As well as his work on brands Jones focuses on the importance of reducing wastage in advertising and thereby increasing efficiency (1998, 1999, 2003 and 2004). The above quotation mentions consumer advertising which is one of the ways this efficiency works. This rise in franchise films can partly be attributed to how films are advertised, according to film producer and author Lynda Obst ‘[y]ou can’t pay for television advertising in every city in the world, so you become dependent on pre-awareness of the movie’ (Obst, 2014: 12). Obst uses her own industry experience to explain how Hollywood has changed its movie-making practices in recent years and discusses why studios are making more sequels or recycling ideas. The pre-awareness Obst examines is created by studios through the production of sequels, which build up the franchise and the ‘more the international audience is familiar with a title, the more they look forward to seeing it again. In Hollywood, familiarity breeds success, not contempt’ (Obst, 2014: 15). Consumer advertising includes print, social media, television, radio and various other forms of media that are designed to address the consumer directly.

This reduces wastage by being cost efficient in the long term and has the benefit of both being seen directly by the consumer and promoting the franchise’s brand. In effect, this means that strongly advertised brands can justify and command a premium price. This is a powerful and often measurable long-term effect of successful advertising. This is reflected in the re-emergence of the major Hollywood studios in recent years. Through the use of reboots to keep a franchise alive it has become clear that no star is bigger than the franchise. The purpose of studying franchises is to examine why the hyper-commercial realm of media franchising is so critically delegitimized and even why those involved in franchises might position themselves as distinct. According to Jenkins the ‘commercialism of franchising raises the stakes for media workers to position themselves as creative and as different from

Figure 1 Top 20 films at the UK box office, 1989-2013 (from the BFI Statistical yearbook 2014)

P a g e | 87 all the others that use the same idea or premise or property toward this ongoing commercial end’ (2014). As a result media franchising almost gives an imperative for differentiation, sometimes that differentiation comes from the explicit gendering of a franchise’s identity, as will be discussed later on in Chapter Five. Given the level of interaction that franchises can create, it is necessary to examine how this participation begins.

In 2002, Alan Horn, president and chief operating officer of Warner Bros. Entertainment, stated in Variety that he planned to reduce the number of Warner Bros. films produced each year in order to concentrate resources into fewer but bigger films. To offset the risk of placing more resources into fewer films, Horn planned to create more franchise films – films with an instantly recognisable brand identity that spawn sequels (or prequels), merchandising, a must-see status, and huge profits. Warner Bros.’ Matrix and Harry Potter franchises are examples that maintain this philosophy (Buckland, 2006: 16-17). One of the reasons for selecting a film for the case study which is from a franchise is because from 1989 to 2013 the top twenty films which have dominated the UK film market have been released into a market that already has an established fan base (see Figure 1). As can be seen from this table seventeen out of the top twenty films from the past twenty-five years have come from established franchises: James Bond (the longest running film franchise on the list, Dr No (Terence Young) having been released in 1962), Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich, 2010) (which would have attracted fans of the trilogy as well as fans of Pixar), Harry Potter (adapted from books by J K Rowling four of the eight films in this franchise made the top twenty), Mamma Mia! (Phyllida Lloyd, 2008) (which would have gained spectators because of the stage show as well as the music of ABBA), The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit (both works of J R R Tolkien and all three parts of The Lord of the Rings made it into the top ten), Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (George Lucas, 1999) (which would have attracted fans of the original films), The Dark Knight Rises (Christopher Nolan, 2012) ( which would have attracted fans of DC Comics as well as the Christopher Nolan trilogy), Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (Gore Verbinski, 2006) (the film on the list is the sequel to the successful Curse of the Black Pearl, an interpretation of a ride at Disneyworld) and Marvel’s Avengers Assemble (Joss Whedon, 2012) (the film is a culmination of Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk both 2008 as well as Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger both 2011). The reason for examining this area is that adaptations which already have a large fan base encourage the kind of cinematic experience that I am examining more than any other genre of film. Franchise films open themselves up to engagement by fans because they present a variety of possibilities for identification to take place. This is of interest in relation

to my argument regarding how distracted spectatorship makes certain identities visible. Exploring the various forms of identity that franchises present through their films allows me to examine how distracted spectatorship makes these identities visible.

The two main examples of film franchises that began the saturation of the film market were The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter which were deliberately created to gain a long- term audience, they were made to be ‘movie sagas that would sustain their event status in and between instalments over a period of three of more years. This meant generating a form of hype that would create anticipation but that would not exhaust itself in the first round’ (Grainge, 2008: 135). Film theorist Paul Grainge’s work discusses the growth in merchandising and product placement to the rise of the movie franchise where branding has become central to the film economy. His research concentrates on contemporary film, television and media culture and he has written on memory in relation to exploring the relationship between film culture and the past (2003). Including Grainge’s work on the logic of branding and how it has propelled specific approaches to the status of film allows for the analysis of how the process of branding impacts the individual spectator. The creation of anticipation that Grainge indicates relies on the films’ appeal to the audience and also the success of that appeal. The strategies were clearly thought out, particular with regards to the Harry Potter franchise, as the New Line marketing strategy outlines below:

[They] sought to establish a base of consumer loyalty, preparing the way for the frequent, near annual, re-promotion of the Harry Potter brand throughout the coming decade. Central to this strategy was the idea that (child) consumers would grow with the franchise and its characters as sequels were produced, a principle of maturation that combined with the periodic re-release of the first film, geared to audiences previously too young to consume Harry Potter content (Grainge, 2008: 140)

Wanting to build on the success of the franchise film New Line optioned Philip Pullman’s fantasy series His Dark Materials in 2002. This sense of hopefulness with regard to the momentum of franchise films ‘points towards a core issue within discussions of Hollywood hegemony, namely the degree to which the corporate blockbuster, like Frodo’s ring, has become a bewitching, all-powerful force, a cinema “to rule them all”’ (Grainge, 2008: 147- 8). This is the kind of viewing that franchise films encourage, a fixation with each particular film brand that grows and grows and is led by the fan spectator’s yearning for more knowledge regarding narrative elements that are related to the film’s main storyline. Due to the nature of franchise films a significant part of the spectator’s interaction with them does

P a g e | 89 not take place within the cinema. Through the process of franchising and, therefore, the branding of a film allows for a multitude of ways in which the spectator can relate to a particular franchise.