Moviemaking has long been a gambler’s profession, where million-dollar wagers are laid down, and often lost, with lightning speed. These days, studios are trying to make the movie business as predictable and profitable as serving up Mocha Frappuccinos. Take a look at the multiplex marquee this summer, and you’ll see the studios are behaving more like Starbucks than Caesars Palace. Rather than focusing on challenging dramas or dark comedies, every film company is churning out stories that are so easily identifiable that they can be completely understood by their titles alone: “Spider-Man.” “Star Wars: Episode II–Attack of the Clones.” “Scooby-Doo.” They’re called franchise films, and they are revolutionizing the way Hollywood does business.
Traditionally, filmmaking begins with a screenplay, a director and a cast. A franchise movie typically works backward from the Happy Meal to the plot. Warner Bros. launched “Scooby-Doo,” which is due out in June, when its consumer-products division figured out that a movie about the studio’s crime fighting pooch would bring in an additional $30 million in profits from coloring books and stuffed animals. “We want movies that enhance the value of a core asset,” says Warner Bros. president Alan Horn. Remember when movies used to become theme-park rides? Now theme-park rides become movies. Disney will release “The Country Bears” in July, and is hard at work on films based on Disneyland attractions “The Haunted Mansion” and “Pirates of the Caribbean.” “You are talking about Disney icons that thousands of millions of people have experienced at our parks,” says Disney studios chairman Dick Cook. “They both rank as top attractions and they lend themselves to a movie. You are capitalizing on what is a part of pop culture right now. And history has shown that if you take something out of pop culture and do it well, the rewards can be tremendous.” For the studio, he means. Audiences, meanwhile, may have to settle for some pretty familiar fare.
Franchises should be the greatest, most enchanting thing that ever happened to audiences. What could be better than a movie that never ends? (Assuming it’s not “Glitter.”) The blockbusters that inspired the current mania–“Star Wars” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark”–were rollicking entertainments, and returning for each new installment was practically a communal rite. These days, though, Hollywood is so obsessed with sequels, videos and plastic action figures that originality is almost an afterthought. MGM is dusting off “The Pink Panther,” Columbia, “I Dream of Jeannie” and DreamWorks, “Billy Jack.” And do you think Universal is anywhere near finished milking “The Mummy”? The franchise began its life as a 1932 Universal movie of the same name. Now the studio is discussing “Scorpion King 2” (you may need a spreadsheet to follow the chain: it’d be a sequel to the prequel of a sequel of a remake) and a “Xena”-like television show based on the character Cassandra (a spinoff from a prequel to a sequel of a remake). Studios obviously run the risk of beating franchises to death, but, like the Mummy, a dead franchise doesn’t have to stay dead. Warner Bros. knows that the debacle that was “Batman & Robin” ruined the Batman franchise for an entire generation. So it’s just waiting for a new generation to show up.
Hollywood isn’t trying to please critics with franchises: it’s trying to please Wall Street. In this new era of vertical integration, investors love the franchise because it kicks in revenue every step of the way. MGM vice chairman Chris McGurk, who estimates his James Bond franchise is worth nearly $2 billion, is laboring to turn “Legally Blonde” into a franchise. He’s pursuing both a sequel titled “Legally Blonder”–she runs for president!–and a Broadway musical. He’s also looking to turn “Rocky” into a musical. Believe it or not, most studio executives will admit that, at some point, enough is enough. “A good idea run amok is no longer a good idea,” says DreamWorks cofounder Jeffrey Katzenberg. “You are trying to bring an engineering mind-set to a business that is fundamentally organic and not engineerable.” Of course, Katzenberg is at work on “Shrek 2” at the moment, though you can hardly blame him. “Shrek” was a certifiably great creation, and when the final DVD, video, TV, soundtrack and merchandise receipts are tallied for the movie, DreamWorks will pocket $1 billion in profits. Not revenues. Profits.
The studios like to say the franchise windfall has a trickle-down effect, that it helps fund more daring and serious films. “Listen, dramas by themselves are tough,” Universal’s Snider admits, even though the studio won the best-picture Oscar for “A Beautiful Mind.” “But for us, those franchise movies embolden us to take other chances.” Do they really, though? Take a look at what’s on-screen, in living color. Some filmmakers have been warned not to use the “D word” (for drama) when pitching movies, and people complain year after year that movies are getting worse. “The studios all have gotten away from interesting filmmakers who are working with interesting stories,” says Andrew Kosove, whose Alcon Entertainment funded Christopher Nolan’s thriller “Insomnia” when Warner Bros. wouldn’t. Equally worrisome, companies that used to embrace risky fare are turning timid. Miramax, once the art-house darling, is working on sequels to “Dirty Dancing” and “Pokemon” and remakes of “Seven Samurai” and “The Green Hornet.”
To see how dramatically the franchise formula has rearranged studio priorities, look no farther than Columbia Pictures. Two years back, Columbia’s lineup included “Girl, Interrupted,” “28 Days” and “The End of the Affair.” These days, Columbia’s releases include “Spider-Man,” “Men in Black 2,” “Stuart Little 2” and “XXX,” the last of which was designed by the production company Revolution Studios as a new James Bond series for Gen Y. Producers are working on follow-ups to “Spider-Man” and “XXX” before the movies even open. “We were certainly making more adult dramas a couple of years ago,” concedes Columbia’s chairman, Amy Pascal. “But it’s not like all of our movies are franchise movies. We are hedging our bets.”
The most thrilling and satisfying franchises continue to be born the old-fashioned way: audiences see a movie they love and ask for more. When Warner Bros. released “The Matrix,” the studio feared the movie would baffle audiences and bomb. Now it’s hard to think of projects more eagerly anticipated than parts two and three, both due next year. And it’s impossible to imagine Austin Powers wearing out his welcome. Mike Myers’s shagadelic sequel made more money in its opening weekend than the first film grossed in its entire run.
If you’re looking for reasons to be optimistic about the future, think of it this way: Hollywood has put such a staggering number of new franchises in motion that some of them are bound to be good. In January, director Ang Lee and writer James Schamus, the team behind the elegant and kinetic “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” will bring us “The Incredible Hulk,” starring Australian newcomer Eric Bana and Oscar-winner Jennifer Connelly. And next year the promising writer-director Mark Steven Johnson will unveil “Daredevil.” The movie, which is designed to launch a long series, is based on the comic books about a blind lawyer by day (Ben Affleck) who turns crimefighter at night and battles a villain (Colin Farrell) with deadly aim. One recent day on the set, Johnson and producer Gary Foster peer into a bank of monitors as Farrell, with the help of some invisible wires, zips darts at a dartboard without even looking at his target. “There are five movies in this,” Foster says, as Farrell’s darts hit the bull’s-eye one after another. All any franchise could ask for is that kind of aim.
