Why some franchises go downhill while others stay great

A little break from our typical economics fare.

Warning: This post contains spoilers for a number of popular science fiction and fantasy entertainment franchises.

You know, I was writing a post about some substantive econ stuff, and halfway through I realized that my original thesis wasn’t really supported by the data. So, being a writer of great laziness intellectual honesty, I decided to table that post and write about something fun and lighthearted instead. And I happened to just watch the first episode of the new season of HBO’s Game of Thrones spinoff series House of the Dragon, so I thought I’d write about franchises.

I am certainly no expert in creating high-quality big-budget entertainment franchises like Star Wars, Star Trek, Game of Thrones, and so on. But I am an opinionated consumer of them, and as far as I can tell that’s all you really need in order to write about the topic.

The fundamental fact of entertainment franchises these days is that pretty much everything is a sequel, a remake, or an adaptation. Adam Mastroianni has the data here:

Source: Adam Mastroianni

The trend is creeping into television too. From spinoff series like House of the Dragon and Better Call Saul to adaptations like Foundation and Shogun, much of television is now based on established media properties as well.

The economic forces behind this trend are extremely simple to understand. Creating new entertainment franchises (or IPs, as they’re known) is a hit-driven business — you really never know ahead of time what audiences are going to love and what they’re going to ignore. So if you’re in a hit-driven business, the only thing you can really do is make a bunch of stuff and hope people like it. But this is inherently a risky business. If the cost of producing a new franchise increases — as it has in television, where the shift to “prestige TV” has raised the bar for production values — then the risk is even greater.

Investors do not like risk. Media companies want to please investors. So there’s huge economic pressure on the executives of media companies to turn volatile hit-driven business models into stable predictable business models with recurring revenue. And the way you do that is to stick with existing properties — sequels, remakes, and adaptations of already-popular source material. Franchise continuation gives you some idea of who your audience will be and how your movie or series might perform. Thus, it partially de-risks the entertainment industry.

In this new franchise-driven world, the question of “How do you make a good movie or show?” changes a bit. The classic tools of storytelling, dialogue writing, acting, directing, and producing are still crucial, of course (Game of Thrones Season 8 shows what happens when these tools are not employed effectively). But the question of what makes a good story changes when that story is set in an existing universe.

Over the last decade or two, I’ve seen entertainment franchises get this very right and very wrong. Of course, “right” and “wrong” here are just my own subjective evaluations — I think the Star Wars sequels were absolutely atrocious, but they made a huge amount of money. But I think in general my opinions aren’t that unusual, and that over time, the sequels and adaptations that I call “bad” will more often than not lead to diminishing returns for a franchise. For example, I don’t really know anyone who likes the Star Wars sequels now, and I think their narrative failures were one reason why interest in movies like Solo was so weak.

So here are a couple of principles that I think help determine whether franchise installments breathe new life into the IP or run it into the ground.

Good vs. bad prequels: the lure of “lore”

One very common way to continue a franchise is to make a prequel. Just a few examples include the Star Wars prequels, many recent Star Trek shows, and House of the Dragon. But I’ve noticed that while some of these are truly excellent, others are pretty mediocre. What’s the difference?

One big difference, I think, is whether a prequel focuses on filling in the “lore” of a series. Lore, which I believe is a term that came from video games, refers to the history of a fictional world — the events not shown in the story itself.

For example, in the first Star Wars movie, there are two mentions of “the Clone Wars” — one when Luke asks Obi-Wan “You fought in the Clone Wars?”, and another where Leia says “You served my father in the Clone Wars”. Other than that, the Clone Wars never get a mention — the original Star Wars movies never tell us what those wars were about, or what the sides were, or who won, or even why they were called “the Clone Wars”. They were simply an event that existed outside the story — part of the lore of the Star Wars fictional universe.

Two decades later, when George Lucas made the Star Wars prequels, he centered them around the Clone Wars. In doing so, he turned lore into story — he actually showed us the answers to all the questions above.

And it was mediocre. Sure, the Star Wars prequels often had clumsy dialogue and confusing directing, but ultimately the story they told was simply less compelling than the one in the original movies. And part of that, I think, was because the prequels were focused on lore. They were all about showing us things that the first three movies had only told us about.

That makes for a very constraining story. It forces you to hit a predetermined set of story beats. Obi-wan had to serve Anakin Skywalker in the prequels because the original movies said he had done that. But the relationship between the two characters ended up feeling forced and wooden.

Lore-focused prequels also make the fictional world seem smaller and more circumscribed. In the first Star Wars movie, when you hear offhand references to “the Clone Wars”, it gives you a sense of mystery and adventure. Having those events exist outside the boundaries of the story makes the viewer feel that this is a universe filled with big important events, mighty warriors, dramatic clashes, and so on. But when you go and show all of those things on screen as part of a new story, the fictional universe starts to feel cramped and self-contained — you’ve seen everything important that happened in this universe, there are no mysteries left to explore.

It simply constrains the imagination. Every kid, watching that first movie, sat around trying to imagine what the Clone Wars were, and how they might have looked. Pretty much none of them imagined they would look like whatever this is:

Another good example is Star Trek: Discovery. Part of Star Trek’s lore is that the Federation once fought a war with the Klingon Empire long ago. Discovery shows us that war. The depiction is incredibly clumsily executed, turning Klingons into bizarre lizard-creatures with little connection to their depiction in other Star Trek series.

But more importantly, it becomes one less thing that fans can imagine about the Star Trek universe. (Star Trek: Enterprise did a lot of this too, but that show was so poorly executed that I couldn’t even make myself watch it.)

I think this is why hardcore franchise fans often get excited about prequels — “OMG, we’re going to get to see the Clone Wars!” — but are so often disappointed with the results. Lore sets fans’ imaginations working, and the version that gets depicted in a prequel will inevitably disagree with how most people had imagined it. And that will lead to disappointment.

One way to minimize this problem is to adapt pieces of lore that weren’t very important to the original story. This is what House of the Dragons does. The civil war known as the Dance of the Dragons isn’t very important in the Game of Thrones plotline, and it doesn’t get much of a mention. As a GoT fan I never sat around imagining the Dance of the Dragons, and I bet most other fans didn’t either. And so when it gets depicted on screen, there’s nothing to contradict.

But nevertheless, and despite the excellent writing and directing, House of the Dragon suffers from being tied to lore. First of all, I know everything that’s going to happen, since I read the wiki. More generally, the entire story is focused on setting up the world as it exists at the beginning of GoT. There are no new fantastic types of magic, no strange new peoples to encounter, no new prophecies or artifacts etc. The story focuses relentlessly on filling in the existing backstory of GoT.

Really, I think it comes down to this: Good fictional universes are always bigger than the story. And when you try to expand the story to show every single important event that ever happened in a fictional universe, the universe becomes cramped and small and there’s no room left for your imagination.

Now note that there’s a big difference between filling in detail about the world, and filling in detail about characters’ backstories. Prequels that feature younger versions of our beloved characters are fine. The reason is that most fans can’t really imagine good backstories for characters — they need professional writers to fill in those details. Character backstory doesn’t constrain the imagination — it’s more like a flashback.

An example of a truly excellent prequel is Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which is my favorite recent Star Trek series. It takes place on the original Enterprise before Captain Kirk takes over, and it features several of the characters from the 1960s Star Trek series.

And yet the stories told in Strange New Worlds are new. Almost none of what happens in the show was talked about in other Star Trek shows — it’s original stuff. We get to see how Spock and Uhura and some of the other Enterprise crew became the people they were. But the external challenges they face are almost all brand new.

Some of this is because of the show’s episodic format. But a lot of it is just because the writers made the conscious decision to expand the Star Trek universe instead of filling it in. We get totally new stories like the struggle against the Gorn, and the characters have relationships that are either new or were only slightly hinted at in the 1960s show.

And it’s amazing. Fans love Strange New Worlds, and with good reason — it’s the best Star Trek in many years. Probably the best since Deep Space 9 ended in 1999.

Somehow, even with Spock and Uhura and the old classic ship, it still feels like the Enterprise is venturing into the great unknown.

So that’s my first piece of advice for franchises. Don’t fill in the world. Expand the world.

Thematic continuity: “subversion” is best in small doses

Lots of people paid to watch the Star Wars sequels, but almost no one I know remembers them fondly or thinks they were good. The one exception is a small hardcore group of people who think The Last Jedi was a great movie. And when you ask them why, the reason they usually give is that it “subverted” Star Wars’ traditional themes. One example is when one of the protagonists, Rey, is told that she doesn’t come from any special or noble lineage, unlike Luke and Leia in the original movies.¹

But — sorry, Last Jedi fans — who cares? Just because a trope is entertaining doesn’t mean its exact opposite will be entertaining too! Stories about love at first sight are often fun. But a story about two people who meet each other, fail to fall in love, and never see each other again won’t necessarily be equally fun just because it “subverts” the trope of love at first sight.

Thematic “subversion” in fiction is mostly navel-gazing. There are a bunch of mediocre fantasy books that try to subvert the “Hero of Destiny” trope by having the hero be — GASP!! — not actually a very heroic person. And that’s fine, as a story device. But it’s just not enough to create a compelling story on its own. You have to have your antihero actually do something interesting and be an interesting person, instead of just sitting around very conspicuously not being the Hero of Destiny.

I know tons of people who think they’re the Hero of Destiny but aren’t really. They’re not that interesting. They tend to get into crypto scams or spend a lot of time online yelling about politics.

Similarly, it’s not that interesting that Rey isn’t of noble birth in The Last Jedi. If she had grown up thinking she was of noble birth, and then found out she wasn’t, that could have been a very cool story. In fact, this is the plot of the Chronicles of Prydain, which is an excellent young adult fantasy series that you should all read. But The Last Jedi doesn’t do anything like that. The fact that Rey isn’t of noble birth isn’t actually a plot twist to her — it’s only a twist to fans that had been conditioned to expect something different. That is inherently kind of boring.

A lot of franchises also try too hard to shake up their styles and story structures. A good example is The Legend of Korra, the sequel series to Avatar: The Last Airbender. The first series is a pretty straightforward Hero of Destiny quest in a cool original world. Korra tries to get away from that formula, but never really finds anything else that works. Each season is basically a new experiment. Season 1 is a battle against some vaguely leftist revolutionaries, Season 2 is mostly a flashback showing the history of magic, Season 3 is a fight against some terrorists, and Season 4 (the best season) is a fight against a fascist conqueror. Korra is watchable, but none of the seasons really manages to recapture the magic of The Last Airbender.

Star Trek: Discovery is sort of like this. It dispenses with the usual episodic nature of Star Trek in favor of long continuous narratives. It changes the tone from optimistic to grim and dark. It experiments with various new settings — an alternate universe, the far future, etc. All of these are interesting experiments, but none of them really captured the love of Star Trek fans.

The problem here is that trying very hard to subvert the things fans love about a franchise sort of defeats the purpose of a franchise. Movie and TV studios love franchises because they appeal to an existing, known audience. But if you take away the style that made the audience like the franchise in the first place, you might as well be creating a new IP.

That doesn’t mean that fans simply want comfort food. Lots of franchises stagnate over time by just doing the same thing over and over again (Marvel, I’m looking at you). But it’s best to evolve a franchise’s themes and styles over time. Instead of plunking down a whole new thing in front of viewers and expecting them to enthusiastically embrace it because it has the franchise logo painted on the side, try inserting new elements into the familiar format one by one and seeing whether fans like it or not.

Star Trek did this with The Next Generation, the most popular and successful TV series of the entire franchise. The first season starts out very similarly to the old 60s show, except with a little less fighting and more negotiating. Over the next two seasons, TNG evolves into something very different and original — a show that’s almost entirely about understanding and sympathizing with the unknown. Similarly, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine succeeds by slowly evolving from TNG-type optimism into a darker story about war. TNG and DS9’s small, continuous experiments succeeded where Discovery’s big splashy overhauls fell flat.

Another great example here is Andor. The best Star Wars TV show focuses on the political themes and story devices that made the original movies great — rebellion against overwhelming odds, choosing selflessness over financial incentives, and so on. It changes up that original format in a number of ways, but doesn’t attempt to flip everything about Star Wars on its head.

So the rule here should be: Evolve, don’t subvert. When you catch lightning in a bottle, don’t let it go and assume that you can catch it again just because your bottle has the same label on it.

Ultimately, both filling in lore and subverting themes are shortcuts — ways to continue a franchise without figuring out how to write a compelling new story in an existing fictional universe. But although franchise continuation makes storytelling less financially risky, it doesn’t actually make it easier. Just because an IP comes with a built-in audience doesn’t mean that audience is going to be easy to please.

An age of adaptations, sequels, and remakes might sound boring and stale, but it really doesn’t have to be.

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1. This ends up being retconned in the third movie. And it still isn’t interesting, and the third movie is also terrible.