Media Franchising

Creative License and Collaboration in the Culture Industries

Derek Johnson

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780814743898
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

"Johnson astutely reveals that franchises are not Borg-like assimilation machines, but, rather, complicated ecosystems within which creative workers strive to create compelling 'shared worlds.' This finely researched, breakthrough book is a must-read for anyone seeking a sophisticated understanding of the contemporary media industry."
—Heather Hendershot, author of What's Fair on the Air?: Cold War Right-Wing Broadcasting and the Public Interest

While immediately recognizable throughout the U.S. and many other countries, media mainstays like X-Men, Star Trek, and Transformers achieved such familiarity through constant reincarnation. In each case, the initial success of a single product led to a long-term embrace of media franchising—a dynamic process in which media workers from different industrial positions shared in and reproduced familiar cultureacross television, film, comics, games, and merchandising. In Media Franchising, Derek Johnson examines the corporate culture behind these production practices, as well as the collaborative and creative efforts involved in conceiving, sustaining, and sharing intellectual properties in media work worlds. Challengingconnotations of homogeneity, Johnson shows how the cultural and industrial logic of franchising has encouraged media industries to reimagine creativity as an opportunity for exchange among producers, licensees, and evenconsumers. Drawing on case studies and interviews with media producers, he reveals the meaningful identities, cultural hierarchies, and struggles for distinction that accompany collaboration within these production networks. Media Franchising provides a nuanced portrait of the collaborative cultural production embedded in both the mediaindustries and our own daily lives.

1

Imagining the Franchise

Structures, Social Relations, and Cultural Work

In August 2007, the premiere of High School Musical 2 on the Disney Channel drew an estimated 17.2 million viewers, setting a new record for basic cable television viewership in the United States. The phenomenal reach of this made-for-television movie about singing teenage athletes extended far beyond the television screen, however. As an intellectual property owned by Disney, High School Musical provided the germ for film sequels, ice shows, concert tours, character dolls, tween apparel, and sing-along CDs and DVDs. Considering all these offerings, the New York Times described High School Musical simply and without reflection as “a budding franchise” that rivaled Mickey Mouse.¹ Irreducible to a single media platform, this migratory property could be more easily understood as a coordinated system in which multiple profit centers worked under a shared brand name—just as the McDonald’s franchise unites hamburger shops in different locales to function more efficiently and profitably under a standardized corporate umbrella. The Times spent no time explaining this metaphor to its readers; instead, the idea of media franchising had clearly become cultural shorthand for understanding the expansion of cultural production across different media and industry sectors.

Similar shorthand marked the January 2008 premiere of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles on the Fox broadcast network. From the shared premise of killer robots sent back in time to kill the humans that oppose them in a post-apocalyptic future, the original 1984 Arnold Schwarzenegger Terminator film had already spawned the sequels Terminator 2: Judgment Day in 1991 and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines in 2003, while also supporting action figures, video games, and even 3D theme park experiences. Though the ongoing writers’ strike may have helped bring script-starved viewers to the next iteration in Sarah Connor, making its delayed debut the top-rated premiere of the 2007–2008 season, many critics applauded the series for successfully reinvigorating a wilting Terminator property.² In USA Today, for example, Robert Bianco exclaimed, “Now this is how you rejuvenate a franchise.”³ Terminator, therefore, evidenced the critical and popular grasp of media franchising not only as cultural production spanning multiple industries, but also as persisting over time.

Of course, Terminator and High School Musical were only two examples of television and other media industries’ embrace of franchising. That same year, trade publication Variety reported that the 2008 remakes of “dusted-off franchises” Knight Rider and Beverly Hills 90210 generated more audience awareness than any other freshmen television series premiering that fall.⁴ Even if dusty, franchising offered an industrially celebrated potential to multiply and extend brands with a proven history of success. In that context, it was less surprising when Variety suggested two days later that premium cable outlet Showtime would apply the same production logic to niche lesbian drama, “hoping to extend the life of its ‘L Word’ franchise with a spinoff.”⁵ By 2011, film studios similarly dependent on this kind of multiplied production envisioned the conclusions of serialized Harry Potter and Twilight franchises as reason to acquire the rights to other fantasy book series with “the potential to spin off sequels” anew.⁶

From these brief examples, one could define media franchising in the terms of products and intellectual properties extended in an ongoing fashion within the culture industries. Such a definition would include repeatedly reproduced or reinvented intellectual properties as James Bond, Star Trek, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Law & Order, CSI, The Matrix, Pokémon, X-Men, Batman, Teen Wolf, Sex and the City, and Transformers. Newer properties such Glee could be considered emerging franchises, positioned for long-term management and investment across a range of media markets. Properties like The Golden Compass constitute would-be franchises, intended to support long-term development but mismanaged at some point to impede continuance. Despite many such franchises sharing roots in science fiction and fantasy genres, franchising clearly cuts across genres. It is not a generic category of its own. Yet any attempt to define media franchising by reference to the texts it produces invokes many similar challenges to those facing genre analysis. Andrew Tudor has identified an “empiricist dilemma,” in which genre means to generate deeper understanding of a group of texts, but the genre category itself is paradoxically defined by way of texts already assumed to fit the analytic conclusions that constitute the category.⁷ As Jason Mittell argues more recently, when we define cultural categories like genre according to the texts we already assume to be contained by them, we lose sight of the dynamic industrial and cultural factors that shape and transform the categories over time. Instead, “by regarding genre as a property and function of discourse, we can examine the ways in which various forms of communication work to constitute generic definitions, meanings, and values within particular historical contexts.”⁸ My aim is not to make an argument for franchises as a genre (there are already too many generic categories operating across franchising: Lord of the Rings as fantasy, James Bond as thriller, to name just two). Nevertheless, as a cultural category, the franchise must be understood not just as a function of textuality, but as an industrially and socially contextual dynamic constituted by historical processes and discourses. If we claim that Star Wars is a franchise, but cannot explain franchising without reference to Star Wars, we can only tread intellectual water.

Instead of trying to define franchising in terms of lists of products, the key here will be to consider the economic and cultural forces that have shaped, imagined, and structured franchising, as well as the industrial structures, social relations, and cultural imaginaries that franchising has in turned facilitated. We must explore the way that franchise structures enable exchanges between nodes in industrial networks, and how social relations on an industrial level underpin those exchanges. From there, we must also consider more thoroughly how media came to be understood through the lens of franchising in the first place, how that imaginary developed in response to specific institutional and cultural conditions and struggles, and how that imaginary makes meaningful sense of those conditions and struggles. As a way of organizing, enabling, and giving meaning to collaboration across multiple sites of production, the franchise has been a shifting, slippery, and historically contingent phenomenon. Given that complexity and contingency, the media franchise will not be reducible to a tidy, universal definition. While at the most broad level, we might start by conceiving of franchising as an economic system for exchanging cultural resources across a network of industrial relations, we also have to recognize it as a shifting set of structures, relations, and imaginative frames for organizing and making sense of the industrial exchange and reproduction of culture.

In pursuit of this understanding, this chapter will identify the social relations of franchising, the industrial structures they enable, as well as the cultural discourses historically brought to bear on media objects to conceive them in the terms of “franchising.” This requires an analysis that begins outside of media studies proper to consider the history of franchising as a means of sharing business formats within the retail industries. The origins of the franchised media of the latter twentieth century lie as much in the culture of McDonald’s, Mr. Goodwrench, and Chicken Delight that emerged in the 1950s and ‘60s as any specific media culture. As previous research in business management and organizational communication has shown, these business systems operated not just through economic structures, but through social and cultural relations as well. With that social and cultural understanding in mind, we can then ask how similarly franchised relationships might structure and enable production in the media industries. Although retail franchising does not perfectly map onto media production, the social relations shared by both allow us to better understand the industrial exchanges facilitated in and by media franchising. Rather than impose this borrowed franchising logic upon media production in pursuit of a new theory, however, this chapter also seeks to examine how media work has already been theorized and imagined as franchising by practitioners, critics, and consumers. How did franchising emerge as a cultural logic to explain these relations and exchanges in the media industries of the late twentieth century, and what impact did that imaginary have on the organization of and meanings attached to cultural production? To explore the cultural work performed by this imaginary, this chapter will examine the cultural consequences of franchising through the lens of gender. On the one hand, franchising has enabled on a structural level the differentiation and multiplication of production along gendered lines of marketing and consumer appeal. On the other, the multiplication of production itself has been imagined in gendered terms through franchising, ascribing to these industrial structures and practices culturally constructed meanings and values. From these analyses, this chapter argues that franchising works to both organize and give meaning to production practices of the culture industries.

Franchising Beyond Transmedia

Any study of the franchised production of culture must acknowledge Henry Jenkins’ theorizations of transmedia storytelling and world-building in their keen understanding of the formal and practical relationships between texts in different media. Jenkins analyzes media franchises as a manifestation of “transmedia storytelling, . . . a new aesthetic that has emerged in response to media convergence—one that places new demands on consumers and depends on the active participation of knowledge communities.”⁹ Trans-media storytelling results in the production and maintenance of fictional “worlds,” like those of The Matrix and Harry Potter, that consumers experience in collaboration with one another by piecing together narrative materials professional producers have strewn across media platforms. Yet as a paradigm for understanding franchising in its historical and discursive industrial dimensions, transmedia storytelling remains somewhat limited. First, the privilege accorded to transmedia storytelling by its association with the “new” formal relationships, productive practices, and digital platforms of convergence culture points us away from consideration of the longer industrial history of franchising. Second, while Jenkins’ exemplars of transmedia storytelling feature serialized narratives in which each piece of the dispersed story plays a unique, integral role, franchises like Star Trek, Batman, and X-Men have also been extended in narratively episodic, redundant, even clumsy ways that do not fit this more coherent, unified aesthetic. Further, while Jenkins recognizes audience participation in transmedia story telling, he privileges franchises like The Matrix in which strong authorial figures like the Wachowski brothers manage the worlds “co-created” across platforms.¹⁰ Transmedia storytelling envisions a unified, serialized, and centrally authored mode of franchising, but provides less insight into decentralized, episodic, and non-narrative modes of multiplied industrial production.

However, franchising has been both overshadowed by and synonymized with transmedia. Long before Jenkins’ descriptions of convergence culture, Marsha Kinder identified in the late 1980s another set of textual forms and practices of production and consumption as “transmedia.” Exploring how children consumed film, television, and video games in tandem, Kinder observed a “transmedia intertextuality” positioning children to recognize genres, identify with characters, and perceive the value of systemic operations across media.¹¹ Feeding this transmedia intertextuality were what Kinder called “entertainment super systems”: properties like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and The Muppets that could be experienced in unique ways through textual offerings in different media. While Kinder’s descriptions differed from Jenkins’ transmedia storytelling, one could retrospectively hypothesize that entertainment super systems prepared children of the 1980s for the aesthetics of adult franchises like The Matrix a decade later, evincing the historical character of transmedia beyond contemporary convergence culture. Michael Kackman, in fact, articulates transmedia to his historical study of product licensing for the 1950s Hopalong Cassidy television series. Kackman demonstrates how a set of industrial circumstances and intellectual property logics led to a specific and historical form of cultural production and consumption defined primarily by licensing agreements between companies, the growth of international television trade, and trademark law.¹² Jenkins, Kinder, and Kackman each examine different contextual manifestations of transmedia culture, identifying a shared historical trajectory into which franchising might be situated.

Nevertheless, the study of franchising as an industrial structure, set of social relations, and cultural imaginary cannot be fully subsumed within the scholarly inquiry into transmedia. Though the term “transmedia” has taken on industrial use, with the Producers Guild of America introducing trans-media producer credits in 2010,¹³ this current institutional vogue obscures other discursive buzzwords and logics that have alternately imagined creativity within intellectual property management, each with their own histories, biases, and industrial meanings attached (including “franchising” but also including “total merchandising,” “toyetic” media, or “synergy”). Theories of transmedia also offer reduced insight into the production of franchises like Star Trek, Law & Order, or CSI that multiply within a single medium like television (resulting in spin-off series like Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, CSI: Miami, and CSI: New York, for example). Similar dynamics structure the comic book industry (with franchises like X-Men supporting numerous monthly titles) and the sequel-driven film and video game industries (which depend and thrive upon perennial franchises like Saw and Halo, respectively). The question of the multiplied production and reproduction of franchising is not always one of transmedia. Nevertheless, the two terms have become nearly inseparable in contemporary media scholarship. In addition to individual research projects that link the two inquiries, whole academic conferences (often in partnership with the industry) have dedicated themselves to an interest in “transmedia franchises.”¹⁴ We have become too enamored with the sexiness of the transmedia in transmedia franchising to think much about what other cultural trajectories and industrial formations have been entangled in franchising. So while franchising has been most commonly understood as a function of transmedia storytelling, this remains only one manifestation within a much longer and more complex history that demands greater attention.

While some scholarship has tackled franchising on its own terms, this work rarely aims to illuminate the historical structures, relations, and imagination of media franchising at large. Most scholars do not make the explicit connection between media culture and franchise culture. In his study of the global influence of American popular culture, Lane Crothers comes extremely close to articulating the two, but pulls back by situating global franchise businesses like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola as something to be examined “in addition to American music, movies, and television programs.”¹⁵ Though addressing some interplay between these retail franchises and the media industries through promotional tie-ins, Crothers stops short of considering media culture as something that is itself franchised. Other scholars more explicitly recognize the franchising of media culture, but still avoid exploring what that might actually mean. Lord of the Rings is certainly extraordinary in terms of its critical and commercial success, and Thompson’s subsequent treatment of it in The Frodo Franchise as an exemplary case obscures its participation in a longer history of franchise ...