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>> 27 1 Imagining the Franchise Structures, Social Relations, and Cultural Work In August 2007, the premiere of High School Musical 2 on the Disney Channel drew an estimated 17.2 million viewers, setting a new record for basic cable television viewership in the United States. The phenomenal reach of this made-for-television movie about singing teenage athletes extended far beyond the television screen, however. As an intellectual property owned by Disney, High School Musical provided the germ for film sequels, ice shows, concert tours, character dolls, tween apparel, and sing-along CDs and DVDs. Considering all these offerings, the New York Times described High School Musical simply and without reflection as “a budding franchise” that rivaled Mickey Mouse.1 Irreducible to a single media platform, this migratory property could be more easily understood as a coordinated system in which multiple profit centers worked under a shared brand name—just as the McDonald ’s franchise unites hamburger shops in different locales to function more efficiently and profitably under a standardized corporate umbrella. The Times spent no time explaining this metaphor to its readers; instead, the idea of media franchising had clearly become cultural shorthand for understanding the expansion of cultural production across different media and industry sectors. Similar shorthand marked the January 2008 premiere of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles on the Fox broadcast network. From the shared premise of killer robots sent back in time to kill the humans that oppose them in a post-apocalyptic future, the original 1984 Arnold Schwarzenegger Terminator film had already spawned the sequels Terminator 2: Judgment Day in 1991 and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines in 2003, while also supporting action figures, video games, and even 3D theme park experiences. Though the ongoing writers’ strike may have helped bring script-starved viewers to the next iteration in Sarah Connor, making its delayed debut the top-rated premiere of the 2007–2008 season, many critics applauded the series for successfully reinvigorating a wilting Terminator property.2 In USA Today, for example, Robert Bianco exclaimed, “Now this is how you rejuvenate a franchise.”3 Terminator, therefore, evidenced the critical and popular 28 > 29 within particular historical contexts.”8 My aim is not to make an argument for franchises as a genre (there are already too many generic categories operating across franchising: Lord of the Rings as fantasy, James Bond as thriller, to name just two). Nevertheless, as a cultural category, the franchise must be understood not just as a function of textuality, but as an industrially and socially contextual dynamic constituted by historical processes and discourses . If we claim that Star Wars is a franchise, but cannot explain franchising without reference to Star Wars, we can only tread intellectual water. Instead of trying to define franchising in terms of lists of products, the key here will be to consider the economic and cultural forces that have shaped, imagined, and structured franchising, as well as the industrial structures, social relations, and cultural imaginaries that franchising has in turned facilitated . We must explore the way that franchise structures enable exchanges between nodes in industrial networks, and how social relations on an industrial level underpin those exchanges. From there, we must also consider more thoroughly how media came to be understood through the lens of franchising in the first place, how that imaginary developed in response to specific institutional and cultural conditions and struggles, and how that imaginary makes meaningful sense of those conditions and struggles. As a way of organizing , enabling, and giving meaning to collaboration across multiple sites of production, the franchise has been a shifting, slippery, and historically contingent phenomenon. Given that complexity and contingency, the media franchise will not be reducible to a tidy, universal definition. While at the most broad level, we might start by conceiving of franchising as an economic system for exchanging cultural resources across a network of industrial relations , we also have to recognize it as a shifting set of structures, relations, and imaginative frames for organizing and making sense of the industrial exchange and reproduction of culture. In pursuit of this understanding, this chapter will identify the social relations of franchising, the industrial structures they enable, as well as the cultural discourses historically brought to bear on media objects to conceive them in the terms of “franchising.” This requires an analysis that begins outside of media studies proper to consider the history of franchising as a means of sharing business formats within the retail industries. The origins of...

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