Film Franchises Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2250 words

Film Franchises - Essay Example The Harry Potter (#5,7,11,14) film franchise, meanwhile, is a pentalogy while the Star Wars series (8,17,20) is an octology (IMDb. All-Time Worldwide Box Office). It is worthwhile to mention that the James Bond film franchise, which consists of a series of 23 films ranks first The hereinabove data is a potent proof of the reality that in the movies, moviegoers would rather prefer to patronize movies which they are familiar with in terms of the characters and the story lines and which they know beforehand that there is a high possibility of them enjoying the movies to the hilt. They would rather not risk their money and time with films which they are not so sure whether the quality, the acting and the direction and the story would be to their liking. Like in books, comic strips, TV serials, one good thing must lead to another. are a ready, hard-core audience, a marketing hook and a possibility of generating new fanatics by simply improving the visual quality of the succeeding serials through the taking advantage of advances in cinematic technology especially the special effects phase of film making. Sadly though, many movie producers fail to sustain the movie going public's interest in their purported movie franchises, inevitably run out of steam and end up only in the sequel stage. Others run short of ideas and need the most opportune time to stage another reboot or even a prequel to continue the movie franchise undertaking. An example of this is The Chronicles of Narnia which had already netted more than $1.168 billion but is at the moment stymied in its production of a third serial, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, due to a finalisation of a more convincing and appealing screenplay (Sammons 2004, p.48). The most crucial challenge to all though, would be how to vigorously maintain the franchise's commerc ial appeal and potential and yet make it firmly self-contained as a narrative so that it will not end up churning a "series that outstays its welcome" (Thompson 2008, p.7). History of Film Franchises The movie world took a while to discover the magic and the marketing power of film franchises. Since the birth of cinema on December 28, 1895 when French