Why are franchises important to film producers and audiences?

So recently, I found myself going through some exam questions in preparation for my upcoming exams.  One of the questions for the Film Studies exam was a question about franchises being important to the film industry and blah blah blah.  I decided this was as good a time as any to start complaining about everything even remotely connected to the idea of movie franchises, this was my answer:

Film franchises are important to audiences because they provide a sense of familiarity in characters and storyline.  Audiences will keep paying to see new instalments of franchises they enjoy about characters they like.  They will be eager to keep going back to find out what happens to those characters and how they develop, although, in the case of an adapted property, a lot of people will see the film because they are interested to see how the franchise has made the jump from it’s original format to the big screen.

This means that film franchises become very important for producers and production companies, who, more often than not are making the franchise for the sole purpose of PROFIT!

The majority of major film franchises consist of adapted properties, as producers can pick out the franchises that are already popular, they can almost guarantee themselves a massive income from the pre-existing fanbase.

But franchises can often cause people to start using the term “remake”, usually to varying degrees of inaccuracy.  If two films are made of the same property, it’s less a remake that someone else’s adaption, for instance, a lot of people consider the American “Let Me In” to be a remake of the Swedish “Let the Right One In”, whereas, in actual fact, both are an adaption of a novel; and in any case, the Swedish version was released in 2008, and the American version in 2010, which means the American one would probably have already been in early stages of pre-production when the Swedish version was released, and one can hardly remake something they haven’t seen yet.

Similarly, Tim Burton’s upcoming “Dark Shadows” is being accused of being a remake, even though the property it’s based on was a TV series! That would be like saying “The Simpsons Movie” was a remake, but it’s just not, it’s essentially a feature length episode of a series.  So “Dark Shadows” might not have any of the original cast, but that’s because the TV series was syndicated several decades ago, and now all of the original cast are either too old or too dead to play their characters.

Something can only logically be classified as a remake if it’s a new version of something that started out as an original screenplay, not if it’s just  a(nother)  adaption of a property.

My point being that franchises are as much of a danger to producers as they are a monetary opportunity, as they’re likely to be wrongly accused of making  remakes, which for some reason are often considered in a rather derogatory manner.

Producers tend to see franchises as important, because they’ll look at some other franchises like “Harry Potter” or “Star Wars” and decide that they also want to start a franchise that could earn billions.  And it’s  initially a very good idea, and in some cases, like “Harry Potter” it will work enough to make approximately 6.3 billion dollars, and in cases like these, audiences will appreciate that adaption that’s been done; but in other cases, like anything that has the name Tim Burton associated with it, audiences will just make accusations of it being a “remake” and that the producers are “too lazy to do anything original”, so it may seem more sensible to make a franchise out of original characters, but then of course, the producer is in danger of catching ‘George Lucas Syndrome’ and just re-releasing the same old films time and time again, but each time it will have “changed” slightly, like having a slightly different sound design, or be in 3D.

All in all, whilst franchises seem like a profitable idea, the producers seem to be in danger of ruining their careers, and the audiences aren’t that safe either, given that most of them  can’t seem to tell the difference between remakes and adapted properties, which, in a world where most films are either of those things,  it really is something that more if them ought to have a better ability to distinguish between.

So: how important are franchises to producers and audiences? I’d say very important, as the way things are at the moment, it seems that franchises will end up causing the ultimate demise of the entire film industry!