Just How Long can a Franchise Really Last

How long can a long running film series rely on its bag of tricks to keep working for an audience before it starts to run thin?

These are fairly fundamental questions the first one in particular has been running through my mind in the last little while and I have been very tempted to put it all into a column (good thing I decided to do so now.)

This also became reinforced in my mind with the recent announcement of a 5th Indiana Jones film to be made with Harrison Ford as Indy once more (despite his age) and Steven Spielberg once more in the director's chair.

And all I could think was reading that announcement was "This just feels like a merchandise grab by Disney as the Star Wars stuff has been selling like Hotcakes" and also what doesn't help things was that the last Indiana Jones film 2008's Kingdom of the Plastic Prop sorry Crystal Skull (bit of a memory lapse there for a split second) was just bleh and boring and all it did for me was remind me of how good Raiders of the Lost Ark really was.

The other primary thought I had was "This was done after the Last Crusade" which I thought ended the series beautifully with the 4 heroes riding off into the sunset (Indeed originally "The End" was going to appear on screen after that moment but that idea was abandoned.)

Indeed Franchises in the old days pretty much went to 3 films and then came to a stop as for the most part the 2 sequels that followed would suffer diminishing returns at the box office as traditionally the quality of those sequels sank with the 2nd and 3rd films (sometimes the 2nd would be good as was the case with Lethal Weapon but then the third would just ruin it completely.)

And I can't help but feel that that rule in terms of "3 films and done" when it comes to a franchise was in place for a reason as so many franchises now (Jurassic Park, The Terminator, Alien, Indy to name a few examples) are trying desperately to mount a comeback much in the same way that Batman, James Bond and the X-Men have done.

The key difference with those 3 franchises however is that each of those told a story that had yet to be told in that franchise and they just happen to be reboots or in the case of X-Men a semi reset using time travel in Days of Future Past.

Batman and Bond meanwhile told the origin stories of those characters, Batman Begins in 2005 showed us on film how Bruce Wayne became Batman which we had never seen done before as a feature film (and it was not wanted to be done by Tim Burton and his team on the first Batman film in 1989) while Bond finally brought Casino Royale the very first 007 novel to the big screen properly after not having had the rights to that book until the year 2000 when Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson were able to win them back through a court case.

The other franchises I mentioned above meanwhile just tried to dip into the same bag of tricks that had been dipped into before and had worn thin with the audience during the heyday of that respective franchise indeed both Alien and Terminator had to deal with filling in the hole left behind by James Cameron with Aliens and Terminator 2 and its fair to say that since then it has been nothing but failure in attempts at doing so at least to me.

Another example I have is franchises that have iconic first entries and then just end up creating entries that follow them that are nothing more but pale shadows of the originals and 2 examples I have here are Star Wars and James Bond.

The original Star Wars trilogy are 3 of the greatest movies of all time for me and it's not because of the landmark advancements in special effects that they pioneered but it was also in the way that the storytelling was done, the characters were realized and the myth was built and watching them all over again in their unaltered form I realized just how special those original 3 films really are and just how much the Force Awakens just feels hollow and empty and really nothing more than a remake of the original film.

Bond meanwhile had the first 4 Sean Connery films which were very well done and since then has left an enormous hole that has been very hit and miss in terms of trying to fill it, I liked Tim Dalton and Daniel Craig but their tenures in the role pretty much came to a dead end with weak entries, Bond is a fantastic hero in my mind and while he is a loner character who struggles to build a domestic home life in terms of a home and a wife his loneliness to me makes him very well equipped to defend the earth against all the odds (and Bond is very good at finding a way through no matter how bad things get.)

This was something I felt Dalton's interpretation tried to hook into and I hope that if Craig decides to leave the series whoever replaces him taps into that idea as its one ripe for telling on screen but I'm getting off track at this point.

Some franchises unfortunately tend to run out of gas with the first sequel out of the bank and a classic case of this for me is Paul Hogan's Crocodile Dundee, the first film I thought was fun and clever in equal measure while its sequel was decent but is easily where Hogan should've called it quits with the series instead of trying his luck with a pretty limp 3rd film set in LA in 2001.

But with the Marvel Cinematic Universe formula of franchise filmmaking seemingly ruling Hollywood with an Iron Fist at the moment it does really feel like franchise overload as many other film series like the ones I've mentioned above have been encouraged to try their hand at this sort of series filmmaking but unfortunately all it seems to do for me is just remind me of those days when a series was just 2-3 films and then that was it at least for a fair few years before a revival attempt came along.

So to answer the question I posed as the title of this column "Just how long can a franchise really last?" well for me its I think 2-3 films as I feel that that is how long the bag of tricks can work itself on its audience before it either runs thin or audiences just get fatigued with it all and crave something else (a craving I myself have felt on a few occasions) and it's something the MCU formula is also going to have to contend with I feel in the next 3 years for while the Comic Book fans will be loving it I feel that the non fans the folks who go to these films for popcorn entertainment will soon start to feel the fatigue of them coming so much at once and crave something new to fill that gap.

But as in all things we wait and we see.