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This book places the culture of media franchising in terms of a “creative license” and a dynamic of “collaboration” in order to explore both the subjective experiences of collaborative creativity within media franchising and the licensing relationships and other hierarchical industrial structures shaping it. Through franchising, the media industries exert a cultural license to shape creative practice. While critiques of franchising like those of The Onion or College Humor often prove quite funny, media franchising is no joke as it has proven to be both an economically significant and culturally meaningful way of life in the media industries. Its significance and complexity as a production logic derives from providing creative resources to a wide range of social actors.

The introduction chapter provides an overview of the key elements of media franchises in the context of ongoing digital technology developments. In particular, the chapter explains the history of media franchising and how technologies like video games and streaming video have encouraged a shift from multimedia to transmedia franchise management. A summary of significant shifts in contemporary media franchising follows, including a lack of mid-budget projects in favor of blockbusters, the replacement of stars with characters, experiments with cinematic universes instead of just one-off “tentpoles,” the role of television within franchise management, the pursuit of global audiences, and the entrance of Silicon Valley technology companies into Hollywood. The chapter concludes with a summary of the main ideas of each essay within the edited collection.

This chapter argues that media franchising is not just an imperfect vehicle for implementing synergy, but also a set of industrial production relations that emerged outside of its ideals. The histories of synergy and franchising are distinct yet overlapping industrial and cultural developments. Institutional developments within and across film, television, comics, video games, and toys in the 1980s sparked the embrace of multiplied production, institutional partnerships, and exchange across institutional networks. The industrial negotiation with franchising can be traced across at least three distinct moments since its cultural and economic logics began: early 1980s, late 1980s, and late 1990s. The chapter explores these three moments in relation to Marvel Entertainment and its attempts to franchise the X-Men comic book property, as evidenced in trade and popular accounts of industry strategy.

Bryan Hikari Hartzheim examines how a growing number of top-grossing and popular mobile game titles are extensions of larger media franchises that also stem from other media properties. He posits the licensed mobile game as a flexible, promotional paratext within Japanese video game and anime transmedia franchises such as Dragon Ball and Final Fantasy. As such, his chapter considers the increasingly important role of ancillary, low-budget texts and how they can quickly adapt to changing market conditions to effectively monetize audience interests.

This chapter traces how creativity has developed within the history of the media franchise by moving past world-building to conceptualize the franchise in terms of world-sharing among workers and communities. It examines the creative strategies used to construct the shared worlds, the practices by which shared creative use has been managed, and how media workers have conceived their own creative labors and production identities in relation to these shared structures. World-sharing calls for a consideration of the claims and discourses of franchise authorship in terms of social relations. In assessing these issues, the chapter looks at the creative management of Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek, two science fiction franchises that have engaged in world-sharing across multiple industrial contexts.

This essay works toward a definition of the media franchise and uses the Alien franchise (1979-Present) to consider how digital technologies have influenced a shift in franchise management from multimedia to transmedia. The Alien franchise illustrates how the transition from multimedia to transmedia has brought new demands, such as stricter continuity among texts, stronger collaboration between licensors and licensees, and regular engagement with fans. The authors argue that Hollywood’s turn from multimedia replication to transmedia expansion has led to conflicts of textual continuity, creative ownership, and public relations within the Alien franchise. The chapter dissects these conflicts through the video game Aliens: Colonial Marines (Sega, 2013) as a case study of media franchise mismanagement.

Rayna Denison analyzes how and in what ways the How To Train Your Dragon franchise (2010-Present) has been developed in relation to the success or struggles of DreamWorks Animation. She argues that the franchise has developed primarily in relation to three specific factors: the evolution of its studio; attempts by its production studio to capitalize on new distributive technologies; and tensions between producers that can be read at the level of the franchise’s narrative flows.

This book offers a theoretical and historical intervention that redefines franchising as a model for conceptualizing collaborative production in media culture, problematizing the tendency to consider this media production in terms of convergence culture, and challenging the assumption that socialized creative collaboration defies the labor hierarchies and power structures of industry. By directing attention to the history of media franchising, one can situate today's emerging social media within a wider tradition of collaborative and socially networked culture. The study of media franchising also advocates for a wider scope of analysis for the socialized production and consumption of culture beyond digital formations. In recognizing the kinds of collaborations and media productions franchising has sustained over time, it is possible to situate the current age of convergence within a tradition of reproducing culture out of commons exchange.

Daniel Herbert presents a historical examination of New Line Cinema’s Critters (1986-Present) franchise. The essay looks at the role that home video early on played in the development of media franchises and also explains the centrality of Critters and other franchises to the development of New Line itself. The essay provides an example of franchise management from the industry’s margins.

Heather Lea Birdsall explores the Disney theme parks as a branded franchise space through a number of its video game appearances, including Kinect Disneyland Adventures (Microsoft Studios, 2011) and its 2017 re-release Disneyland Adventures. Her essay makes clear that franchise management unites multiple physical and digital spaces in its strategic global expansion. She argues that tracing the history of Disney park-based games and apps, and considering other ways that the parks have been ‘gamified,’ reveals an ever-deepening trend of using digital game modalities to expand the Disney parks beyond their physical limitations as a means by which to establish and further them as a super-media franchise.

Alexander Champlin focuses on esports, one of the fastest-growing entertainment markets today. His essay specifically analyzes the relationship between esports franchises (i.e., teams), branded esports studio spaces, and video game franchises. Based on five years of site visits, Champlin examines the history of the North American League of Legends Championship Series studio and, to a more minor extent, the Blizzard Arena.

This introduction lays out the case for approaching special effects from a transmedia standpoint, focusing on the unexpected roles they play in building and maintaining the storyworlds of fantastic media franchises and redefining traditional notions of media authorship, performance, and genre. Relevant scholarship on spectacle, film technology and narrative, and transmedia storytelling is reviewed, with an emphasis on the gap between studies of special effects and convergence culture, which this book seeks to fill. An extended discussion of preproduction practices in early cinema and Classical Hollywood provides an alternative framework for understanding special effects as designed imagery. Previews of the book’s chapters conclude the introduction.

James Fleury examines virtual reality in relation to Hollywood promotional strategies. As his essay explains, the virtual format may be struggling to gain mainstream adoption, but media companies continue to use it in service of their existing film, television, and video game franchises. Overall, he argues that this promotional emphasis reflects the tendency for the American film and television industry to enter emerging formats through low-risk experiments in the form of promotional content before making a larger-scale push with original material.

Jennifer Gillan’s chapter looks at how television sitcoms have become another promotional arm by which parent companies prop up their franchises. She considers how sitcoms can play a part in what she calls ‘transmedia marketing circuits,’ looking specifically at the content-as-promotion strategies connected to Black-ish (ABC, 2014-Present) and Parks and Recreation (NBC, 2009-2015). The essay demonstrates that, with the rapid spread of subscription video on demand services that are either directly owned by or are supplied with content from the studios, television content is but one group of repurposable and reusable assets in massive, integrated platforms.

Andreas Rauscher analyzes the complex convergence of film, video games, and other media within the Star Wars franchise. He argues that stylistic influence within the franchise extends in multiple directions, as while the games bear cinematic elements, the recent film entries remediate ludic concepts. Overall, he notes that the remediation of ludic structures and situations provides a key aesthetic element to Lucasfilm and Disney’s recent Star Wars films.

Brian Ruh’s essay analyzes the representational politics in the Japanese-originated Ghost in the Shell franchise (1989-Present). Media franchises continue to struggle with representation, both in front of the camera (e.g., the marginalization of LGBTQ characters in franchise films) and behind it (e.g., a lack of female directors on franchise projects). As Ruh explains, Rupert Sanders’s 2017 American, live-action Ghost in the Shell adaptation sparked a controversy in representation after casting Scarlett Johansson in the lead role of Motoko Kusanagi.

Matthew Thomas Payne’s chapter considers the role of franchise management through video games. He uses the case study of Nintendo’s NES and SNES micro-consoles. His essay posits that franchises can refer to both software and hardware, as the built-in games on Nintendo’s mini-consoles function as a form of franchise management and corporate canonizing by privileging certain video game texts over others.