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>> 233 Conclusion Future Exchanges and Iterations No longer just a soda company, but a massive corporate conglomerate, soft drink giant PepsiCo sought to reinvigorate its restaurant franchising in 1995. PepsiCo owned the Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and Kentucky Fried Chicken brands, yet their combined $18.5 billion annual share of the global fast food market left the company in second position behind the $26 billion McDonald ’s.1 In a bid to cut into that market share, PepsiCo Vice Chairman Roger Enrico developed a new strategy to leverage the power of his multiple franchise brands: instead of continuing to invest in single franchises, why not combine them into one shared mega-franchise? By May of that year, Enrico promised to open 50 new co-branded outlets that could offer products from across all three franchises (a number eventually increased to four with Long John Silver’s added to the franchise network). Whereas PepsiCo had previously overseen a multiplicity of franchises that put independent operators in local markets into relationships with their trademarks, Enrico proposed a new arrangement in which those networks were to be further combined, with trademarks shared, commingled, and exchanged on an even greater scale. As this book has argued, media franchising extended this logic of industrial connectivity, not merely offering iconic brands across multiple markets, but also formalizing collaborative production across boundaries of market , production culture, and institutional identity to reproduce culture over time and across media sectors. Just as retail industries sought to consolidate their franchising—to further network their commercial networks—media firms too have recently turned to co-branding strategies to push the logic of franchising forward. During the Beast Wars iteration of Transformers in 1998, for example, Hasbro Toys acquired the license to Scholastic Entertainment ’s series of science fiction novels, Animorphs, incorporating its shapechanging animal characters into the existing Transformers line to bring the production of two franchises together.2 A decade later, this co-branding logic extended to several of the most high-profile intellectual properties in the entertainment industries. Hasbro introduced a new Transformers: Crossovers sub-brand that reimagined characters from both Marvel Comics and the Star Wars franchise as shape-changing robots. Furthermore, Hobby Japan 234 > 235 developers of Rock Band sought to transform its software content into “a new platform for fans to experience their music.”4 Though Rock Band discs sold at retail offered a finite list of songs for gamers to play, a growing library of downloadable songs continually renewed, refreshed, and reproduced the game (with each song supporting a microtransaction). While based in software , Rock Band became a platform upon which popular songs and musical acts would be reproduced as game culture. Subsequent iterations like Rock Band: The Beatles and Green Day: Rock Band created both new channels of distribution for music and new sites of production in which those tunes were reproduced as digital-rights-managed content only playable in this branded game form. This production network extended beyond Harmonix producers and professional musicians, moreover, to include amateur musicians. By joining the Rock Band Network, amateurs gained access to the tools needed to produce Rock Band content themselves and add it to the download library. If both Lego and Rock Band spoke to a future of co-franchising, they suggested merely an acceleration of the same logic by which franchising had long been structured and imagined: collaborative partnerships that put creative users situated across different production cultures into relations of exchange. Media franchising did not develop through the homogeneous, unified reproduction of brands so much as through negotiated processes of production in which a host of industrial actors and their meaningful social identities have collided on a dynamic, global scale. Through these complex collisions and interactions, media franchising helps us to understand commercial culture as dynamic, not static; collaborative, not univocal; innovative as much as repetitive. These qualities do not stand in opposition to capitalist economies, however: it is precisely because of the desire to sustain and leverage production from intellectual property resources over time that strict institutional ownership controls have come to be matched by a competing cultural imperative to share resources creatively in support of open elaboration , collaboration, and localization. The real significance of this collaborative production of culture by the media industries is not that it supersedes or allows us to ignore the structures of corporate ownership and control underpinning these exchanges. Instead, by remaining attuned to the persistence of creative relations, exchanges, and identifications within franchising, we can see how...

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