Franchising: the curious case of WT's Cornetto Trilogy

IN THIS POST ...
- A look at what we mean by franchising, with examples from Working Title
- The concept of hybridity, and why producers and distributors combine genres
- The example of the Corentto Trilogy (for both hybridity and franchising): the budgets, box office, trailers + links for each
- Analysis of how these might reflect WT's production strategies:

-  strong long-term creative relationships
- emphasis on popular genres; hybridity
- 15-ratings
- franchising
- intertextual references (postmodernism) 
- star strategy
- narrow representation of Britain?
- enviable international distribution ... lost?
- closing WT2: whither the WT low-budget films? 

HEGEMONY OF THE FRANCHISE
Franchising, alongside the tentpole strategy (itself rendering four quadrant audience targeting virtually mandatory for would-be blockbusters), has become a predominant model for film producers, one encouraged by distributors looking for easy-to-market titles with built-in recognition and existing audiences, and exhibitors looking to reduce the element of gambling involved in selecting titles for their busy multiplexes.

This post will consider the Cornetto Trilogy...

The big story for the past decade, building on the Michael Bay template of CGI spectaculars, with narrative of secondary concern, has been the seemingly endless line of Marvel and DC Comics superhero comic book adaptations, with 2013 no exception and no sign of any let up in this flow. There are some who loudly decry this trend (eg), notably Alan Moore. If not these then other sci-fi/fantasy epics, from Lord of the Rings to Harry Potter and now The Hunger Games and The Hobbit, alongside animated titles such as Shrek, Toy Story and Monsters Inc, have formed the cinema diet for the bulk of the movie audience, with some horror, comedy and rom-com hits breaking through and an occasional straight or period/costume drama. Split sequels with single book adaptations running to two films is another growing trend.

Indie report on the 2013 UK top ten

Of the 2013 UK box office top ten, only 3 weren't part of a franchise - and the past tense is significant as The Croods will definitely and Frozen ('original' but based on Hans Christian Andersen's Snow Queen) will most likely have sequels:

Iger [Disney CEO] also revealed to Fortune that a stage version of the film, which features voice overs from Broadway stars Idina Menzel, Jonathan Groff and Josh Gad, is currently under discussion at the House of Mouse ....
In addition, movie audiences may soon be treated to a sequel of the Nordic-themed saga, following strong sales of licensed toys based on the film.[BroadwayWorld.com]
The Croods received generally positive reviews, and proved to be a box office success, earning more than $587 million on a budget of $135 million,^[4] and launching a new franchise, with a sequel and TV series already put in development.^[9] [Wiki]

The Rom-Com Audience

I've cross-posted this on the rom-com and AS Coursework blogs, so won't post again here, but there is a lot of info and analysis very pertinent to British Cinema in there, with Warp and Working Title prominent in the analysis and examples used.

Read it here.

Global, not US, market dominates Hollywood (Obst, 2013)

Look out for useful terminology/neologisms below: pre-awareness and tentpoles and tadpoles

$101m global box office, $21m budget (1993)

A few useful nuggests from this article by Phil Hoad, which highlights and critiques some of the points raised by one-time Hollywood hit producer Lynda Orbst in her bio (given an excoriating review by an unimpressed David Thomson, here), but the really important point concerns WHY Hollywood has turned to tentpole CGI/SFX spectaculars, usually within franchises and/or using 'pre-known' brands/books.

Her line of attack, that Hollywood has wrongly turned its back on medium budget concept movies, where the script, not CGI, is king, is a common one - especially from industry veterans...

If it wasn't startling enough when, in 2011, Universal president Ron Meyer commented on the amount of "shitty movies" on his own slate, founding fathers Steven Spielberg and George Lucas stepped up in the same week as Obst's book was published to denounce Hollywood's blockbuster dependency. ... The reckoning – led by baby boomers attacking the recent homogenisation drive in mainstream films – has exposed a generation gap in Hollywood.

Digitisation emerges as one key cause in this shift:

the shrinking of DVD revenue in the mid-noughties halved the studios' profit margins and reduced their appetite for risk

Duncan Jones' Moon: $5m UK sci-fi

DUNCAN JONES, 2009

$5m budget

$10m global box office (£700k UK, $3.3m USA)

Produced by Stage 6 Films

Distributed by Sony Picture Classics:

Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions Group acquired distribution rights to the film for English-speaking territories.^[3] Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions Group was considering making Moon a direct-to-DVD release; however, after Moon premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival in January 2009, Sony Pictures Classics decided to handle this film's theatrical release for Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions Group.^[12]

Rotten Tomatoes reports that 89% of critics gave the film a positive review based on 185 reviews, with an average score of 7.4/10 [Wiki]

KEY POINT: Like Monsters (Gareth Edwards, 2010, $800k), digitisation has opened up even sci-fi to low-budget Indie producers. Genres such as horror have always been accessible to Indies, but until CGI SFX became accessible to anyone with an Apple Mac convincing sci-fi hasn't been a realistic possibility for Indies. Both Moon and Monsters (which won director Edwards the director's seat on the big budget studio production Godzilla: $160m with a $0.5bn take!). Moon had a much larger crew than Monsters, and required extensive set-building, helping explain why its budget was around 10-times higher - but still in the low budget range of, say a Warp or a WT2 production. Strong word-of-mouth and various festival and other awards helped boost box office takings. A slick website further boosts its prospects of DVD/Blu-Ray sales (the long tail?)

A critical hit.

The official site launch page - its a slick production; see next shot

BASIC LINKS:
Wiki, IMDB, RottenTomatoes, Official site, YouTube vids. There is a longer list of articles etc further down.

See full list on the Wiki; despite its low budget, Moon was a multiple award-winner

Consider this from the amctv blog:

Next question:

Why do idiotic films like Transformers and Wolverine get put into thousands of theaters while really excellent science fiction movies like Moon don't show up anywhere?

The short answer is that Transformers and Wolverine are "tentpole" pictures -- i.e., the sort of movies that studios spend millions on in the hope of making millions from -- so naturally they're going to be screened far and wide as well as promoted in a screaming haze of advertising, while Moon -- starring Sam Rockwell as a schmoe on a 3-year moonbase stint -- is sort of the exact opposite: A small movie, made for roughly the cost of Transformer shoot's craft service budget and without the help of a major studio. Moon was never destined to get onto 4,000 screens on opening day.
Now, this avoids the implicit question, which is why studios choose to spend millions and millions on movies based on toys and comic books and not on movies that grownups might not be embarrassed to be seen coming out of in the first place. The answer to that is actually the solution, which is that if you want studios to make those sorts of movies, go out of your way to see them in the theater, rather than just waiting until they wash up on Starz or HBO. It's not that humans are getting stupider, it's that people interested in entertainment that doesn't EXPLODE aren't going into theaters. So, you know. Go.


If you haven't seen this I'd highly recommend it: you'll be astonished for one thing at its cinematographic quality, and the convincing nature of its set, when you're aware of its production budget: $5m (which would merely pay for a quarter of a Hollywood A-lister's basic fee for a movie!). There are some great behind-the-scenes features on the DVD too, showing you how this was achieved.
The one caveat to this is that it helps being the son of David Bowie, even if you have changed your name from Zowie Bowie.

This enterprising directorial debut, working wonders on a modest budget, consciously sets out to operate in the manner of psychological SF movies of the 60s and 70s about the experience of being in outer space: films such as 2001, Outland and Alien, where being on Jupiter or the Moon has become an accepted way of life. Sam Rockwell plays Sam Bell, the sole operator of a plant mining Helium-3 on the Moon to provide energy for Earth. His only company is a computer called Gerty (voiced with slyly condescending concern by Kevin Spacey), and he's nearing the end of his three-year stint. One day, Bell has an accident driving a motor vehicle, and after coming to he discovers he has a doppelganger. Is this figure a clone or his real self? Is he the victim of some conspiracy operated by his callous capitalist employers in league with Gerty? A gripping, thoughtful, extremely claustrophobic movie, its director Duncan Jones, is a onetime graduate student of philosophy. Moreover, he was once known as Zowie Bowie and is the son of David Bowie, no stranger to the world of outer space.

(Philip French for The Observer)

Some links for further reading: 

IMDB

Studio Daily interview

GalaxySailor feature

IndieWire feature

Interview vid on TalkTalk

EyeForEye feature from Edinburgh IFFest

Wiki

Sony microsite

Guardian previews Jones' 2011 thriller Source Code

Trailer on Gdn

Peter Bradshaw review (3/5) in Gdn
Gdn profile of DJones (2009)

US TRAILER [hq]

A beginner's guide to blockbusters

Great article from Murdoch paper The Times taking a wry, but well-informed, look at the process of making a hit movie - lots here you can reference, especially within your coursework blogs and evaluations:

From Times Online

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April 24, 2010

A beginner's guide to blockbusters

You need neither script nor star to have a box office success, it’s all just a matter of timing, chutzpah and explosives

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“The people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions and all else, now meddles no more and longs eagerly for just two things — Bread and Games!”
So wrote the poet Juvenal in AD104, but then he never lived to witness the blockbuster movie season in America: one long canyon run stretching between Memorial Day and Labour Day, in which the studios loose one $200-million behemoth after another in what amounts to what one observer has called a “multimillion-dollar demolition derby played with Porsches”. To make sense of all this, here is a ten-point guide to surviving the summer season.
1. Pick a date. Any date, as long as it lies between May and August. The summer used to be a wasteland, the place the studios dumped dreck like Electra Glide in Blue (“He’s a good cop. On a big bike. On a bad road”); blockbusters were things that happened once in a generation, like Gone with the Wind. But then along came Jaws and Star Wars, ripping up all known box-office records, and audiences hunkered down for repeats. Blockbusters became things that happened every year. Now, a new one is expected every week. This year Iron Man 2 on May 7 is followed a week later by Robin Hood, then Shrek Forever After, then Prince Caspian, all jostling for position.
“There are more teens living in America now than in the history of this country,” says Tom Sherak, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. “It’s all about when the schools are out. It’s driven by that, by how you get them into theatres