# [[Franchise storytelling has become cultural fracking]] ###### December 17, 2024 ##### Everybody is bored by yet another sequel to the prequel of the origin story from a mildly interesting superhero. And yet those sequels, prequels and origin stories keep coming and coming. What's next? Classic blockbuster movies[^1] were risky bets on original content no one had ever heard of. But since 2008[^2] it was franchise blockbusters fueling the movie industry. Franchised storyworlds offered a more reliable scheme of investment than original content. Why should you risk missing the Zeitgeist, when you can just bet on something that has already proven its cultural relevance? With ETF’s, time has told things go up in the long run. With Movies, time has told people like their superheroes. So why not create yet another sequel? The last few years though were rather devastating for the franchise blockbuster genre and for superhero movies in particular. From sequel to sequel, the initial interest of the audience cooled down and increasingly turned into bored cultural obligation.[^3] Yet studios stuck with their model and pumped more marketing money into increasingly short release cycles. They had invested too much already to just call it a day and move on to fresher stories. Franchise blockbuster filmmaking had become an unsustainable business only able to create revenue by exploitative mining of fan culture. You might call it a kind of cultural fracking. At the same time, more sustainable forms of interacting with fan culture are emerging. Cinematic tools have become much more accessible and fan communities can now easily create professional-grade versions of their favorite stories, fixing everything that caused frustration in the initial release.[^4] Speculative AI-Trailers indicate where this is probably going in the next years: instead of being spoon-fed generic superhero boilerplate designed to please shareholders, enthusiasts can cooperate on a global level to spin the stories in the obscure directions people actually want to see.[^5] The trashy [glitch aesthetic associated with this kind of content](https://www.artificialocean.net/p/ai-glitches-are-the-static-noise) may only become a signifier of its fanbase credibility. Instead of desperately fracking for revenue by wasting marketing budgets, studios would be wise to interact with fan culture in a sustainable way and embrace the increasingly sophisticated stories that will emerge in the next years. *PS: Let's fix The Book of Boba first. [^1]: Steven Spielbergs "Jaws" from 1975 is considered the first blockbuster movie. [^2]: "2008 is the year that the first *Iron Man* movie came out, which really launched the Marvel Cinematic Universe as we know it. (...) every year from 2010 to 2020, you had at least three or four Marvel and DC movies among the five or six or seven highest-grossing movies in the world." https://www.theringer.com/2024/3/12/24097898/hollywood-hit-formula-flopped-what-could-come-next-oscars-oppenheimer [^3]: „These days, it often feels less like a blockbuster is something we’re genuinely excited for and more like something we’re culturally obligated to see. It’s safe, it’s predictable, and all those visual effects will look better on the big screen than on our TV.“ https://www.inverse.com/entertainment/what-is-a-blockbuster-movie [^4]: ["M4's The Hobbit Book Edit"](https://m4-studios.github.io/hobbitbookedit/) [^5]: ["Lord of The Rings by Wes Anderson" Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrjL_TSOFrI)