Fast Food Films
Used to be, when someone said the word “Franchise”, the first thing a person thought of was fast-food restaurant chains like McDonalds or Chik-Fil-A or Taco Bell. Now, when someone says “Franchise” the first thing you probably think of are intellectual property farms and media tie-ins. And if you want to sell a film or a comic or even a book, sooner or later some decisionmaker will ask about the “franchise potential”. Can it be a series?
And I personally feel that people who think in those specific terms before greenlighting a project should probably be tied to a chair and forced to listen while black ops interrogators read the social media feed of Patrick Tomlinson to them.
A customer at the store asked me yesterday if I was looking forward to the latest Predator movie, and were shocked when I said “No. No I’m not.”
“But don’t you like Predator?” they asked.
“I liked the first movie, back in the day. And I saw the second movie once, and read a few of the Dark Horse comics.”
And that is where my engagement with the franchise ended. I watched four episodes of Alien: Earth. I knew it wasn’t anything I wanted to keep watching after the first episode, but people kept insisting I’d like it if I watched the second. And then, when I still didn’t like it, they insisted I should watch the third. And then the same process again for the fourth episode, after which I clicked out and haven’t returned.
I mostly checked out of the MCU after Spider-Man: No Way Home. I haven’t watched a DC Comics movie since Man of Steel, and the only reason I watched that is because I was part of a creative summit at DC Comics that week, and they arranged a private screening for DC employees and freelancers. I attended with Keith Giffen, Dan Jurgens, Greg Rucka, and Jeff Lemire, but somehow ended up having to sit next to Eddie Berganza, which is like sitting in a sweaty pile of gum for two hours, so I did not enjoy myself. I stopped watching the Disneyfication of Star Wars after Kathleen Kennedy admitted that they had no writers room for the sequel trilogy and had just been making it up as they went along, forging ahead without any sort of world-building or mapping or even an idea of who the fuck these characters were, or the thought that “Hey, all of these original cast members are getting a little long in the tooth. Maybe we should get them together on-screen for at least one story beat before they begin dying off.”
And don’t even get me started on the utter mess that has become of Doctor Who…
And now we’ve reached the peak era where things that shouldn’t really be a franchise are being mashed together to form one. Perhaps the most egregious example of this is the Nacelleverse, which features a weird, unconnected hodge-podge of comics, cartoons and toys based on several brands from the 1960s-1990s that the Nacelle company has acquired the rights to, because some decisionmaker said, “Hey, I bet if we mash Biker Mice From Mars and RoboForce and The Great Garloo together, people will watch, because people are stupid and social media is making them stupider and they just want to scroll and scroll and scroll”.
Was anyone clambering for a reboot of The Great Garloo? No. No, I can’t imagine they were. But they’ll consume it anyway because that’s what’s available.
In the long-term, this push toward “everything is a franchise” is bad for creativity, and bad for the audience. It’s the entertainment equivalent of McDonalds or Taco Bell. And look, I have nothing against the occasional indulgence of McDonalds or Taco Bell. It can taste good. It can fill you up for an hour or two. But if that’s all you are eating, you will atrophy and die. And if this franchise slop is the only media you are consuming, the same thing will happen to your brain.
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Currently Listening: "I Don’t Feel Like Dancin" by Scissor Sisters
Currently Reading: Last Chance To See by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine