Anything that gets a sequel is now a franchise

Just read some article about the upcoming "Bettlejuice, Bettlejuice"


No it's not a franchise stfu stop calling every movie that gets a sequel/prequel a "franchise"


Born this century much

I mean if it makes a crap ton of money and Keaton is down for another, it's going to turn into a franchise because it'll be a trilogy at that point.

__________________

Well not really. But I am sure that is the hope.

Sorry, but no.

The Beetlejuice franchise now includes 2 movies, 1 TV series, 1 Broadway musical and at least 3 video games. And that's not including the action figures and other toys.

I'm afraid it's very much a modern franchise.

The Beetlejuice franchise even has its own Wikipedia page

This is important to note. A franchise embodies more than just the amount of films.

Exactly, and sometimes franchise owners make more money from merch than from theatrical receipts.

It depends on the franchise, I suppose, but George Lucas famously made more from SW toys and merch than from the movies themselves (before he sold the company).

Many people have a lot of fun with anything you can think of and write down. I'm one of those people who like what you write

"Ya can't top pigs with pigs" - Walt Disney

Whatever Wikipedia says I still hate the word. To me "McDonald's" is a franchise, a movie trilogy with toys is a movie trilogy with toys.


Maybe I didn't use the best example but EVERY big movie released nowadays is touted as a potential "franchise" by some Marvel fan. It's a buzzword. It suggests something open-ended and I don't remember hearing it so often in the 80's or 90's


@bettyking It's to be expected, you're amaze.

Once ownership, products, toys, brand logos, movies, actors, gobs of money, ads and especially lawyers get involved, it's a franchise. Same thing with pro sports. Language changes all the time and calling a movie or two a franchise just increases the $$ value so you can put the brand on bags of underpants, frozen pizza and soup cans.

I'm sorry to break this to you (please don't shoot the messenger) but fiction-based franchises are almost as old as Hollywood itself:

The more I dig into this, the more fascinating it becomes.

Oddly enough, Hollywood's biggest franchise goes back to 1928, and is estimated to have made well over $50 billion for the Walt Disney Co.

Not too shabby for a little mouse!

Oh shit we are getting a sequel to "Twister"


If successful "Twisters" could become a franchise


I'm gonna make a bet right now "Twisters" will not become a franchise

Well, I think the OP's issue is with the usage of the term. Which now becomes an subject of etymology, which, if we start referring to things as a "film franchise" at a later date, we might start applying it to things that fit the definition that arose prior to the use.

However, googling the etymology of the word, the Oxford English Dictionary does say the earliest known use of the noun film franchise is in the 1930s. So that probably isn't retro-active.

OED's earliest evidence for film franchise is from 1933, in Oxnard (California) Daily Courier.

Unfortunately I don't have an account with them, because it looks like there's even a chart for frequency of use over time (which also gets to the heart of the OP's complaint).

https://www.oed.com/dictionary/film-...&tab=factsheet

I don't know if their chart image is a generic placeholder or a preview, but if it's the latter, it does look like there was a stagnation of growth of the term in the 80's and 90's specifically (though not a reduction).



My recollection was referring to things like Friday the 13th or A Nightmare on Elm Street as a "film series" at the time (but retroactively describing them as a "horror franchise"). I suspect, and I might be putting words, or projecting words, like thought-vomit, into the OP's mouth, that there's a crass commercialization associated with the word "franchise" that they really don't like, or maybe it's the assumed need to be open ended and keep going on forever as opposed to just having a few sequels. For example, the Universal's attempt at a Dark Universe that presumably had no soul to them, as opposed to smaller, more concentrated remakes/updates, such as the recent Invisible Man (I assume the former had no soul to them, I actually haven't watched any of the movies in my example. I'm just going off of impressions of reviews. And the OP's username is From Beyond, so I am tilting towards horror here). But I might be extrapolating too much from the McDonald's association. But I really don't know.

Yeah, and the chart shows steady increase since the 1960s, and particularly so in the 1970s. But even when it wasn't growing at a very fast rate, it never ceased to continue to grow.

Japan and Italy had quite a few film franchises in the 50’s and 60’s. *
Italy had their peplum films with Goliath, Hercules, Maciste and one other who escapes my memory. Then Django and Sartana came along during their spaghetti western era.
Japan had Godzilla, Gamera, Zatoichi, Tora San series, Lobe Wolf and Cub, and others.
Even Britain had their own franchises, particularly out of Hammer Productions with Dracula, Frankenstein and The Mummy getting many sequels. And of course, Bond.
The US certainly added to it.

I'll be there. Having been WAY too close to a couple of those awful things in real life, any time I can see a tornado, hear the sirens, see stuff flying through the air (maybe even a couple of cows) have some popcorn and sit in a chair, and not die, I'm up for it. I don't know whether tornadoes are franchised or whether they are intellectual property. As forces of nature, they make their own rules and don't give a crap about IP, franchises or copyrights or lawyers.

Don't forget about the "Carry On..." films, probably the most successful British film franchise, at least in terms of sheer number of titles: 31 films, four Christmas specials, a television series and stage shows produced between 1958 and 1992

I did forget them, but remembered them after the post but yeah, that as well.