Furiously Franchised: Clueless, Convergence Culture, and the Female-Focused Franchise

In the summer of 1995 a low-budget comedy that Paramount picked up after Fox put it in turnaround became, in lead character Cher’s parlance, the “totally prominent” sleeper hit of the season.¹ Amy Heckerling’s Clueless became a nearly instant teen classic, influencing the language, fashion, and style of a generation and challenging the popular opinion that a film whose core audience was teen girls wasn’t financially lucrative. While Heckerling’s film has received limited academic attention, primarily as an adaptation of Emma, the significance of Clueless extends beyond its cinematic iteration. The success of the film became the foundation for a complete multimedia brand, including a television show, a video game, and twenty-one novels. Heckerling and Paramount Pictures (purchased by Viacom) turned the teen flick into a franchise targeted at tween and teen girls as a niche market. Clueless has been credited by industry observer Isabel Walcott for starting the wave of teen films in the late 1990s by having “opened people’s eyes to the fact that if they could get teenage girls to come to a movie, they could make a killing,” although Titanic (James Cameron, 1997) usually receives credit for the industry trend.² Similarly, while Buffy the Vampire Slayer (WB, 1997–2001; UPN, 2001–2003) and Dawson’s Creek (WB, 1998–2003) have been discussed as shaping the niche market for television targeted at teen girls and innovating convergence media for that market, they were in fact predated by the Clueless television show (ABC, 1996–1997; UPN 1997–1999).³ Tracing the history of the film Clueless reveals an extensive franchise that exemplifies media convergence centered on girls. This history destabilizes media myths that discursively posit the franchise as masculine or frame the female-driven franchise as a novel phenomenon.

A perusal of the trade press reveals that Hollywood “discovers” that girls and women can support a media franchise fairly frequently. The achievements of Sex and the City (HBO, 1998–2004) and Twilight (Catherine Hardwicke, 2008; Chris Weitz, 2009; David Slade, 2010; Bill Condon, 2011, 2012) were met with ebullient press accounts touting the surprise of these franchises’ financial success. Summit ended up with Twilight because larger studios passed on it, largely because of the conventional wisdom that “female-driven properties aren’t always the safest bet.”⁴ A common narrative is that Sex and the City, Twilight, and High School Musical (Kenny Ortega, 2006) changed this attitude, as “films playing mainly to women . . . have gradually been seeping into Hollywood’s consciousness.”⁵ The acknowledgment of these female-centered franchises is important but all too familiar. After Clueless’s success a number of films targeting this audience followed, leading the Guardian to argue that “Hollywood has re-acquainted itself with the young female audience,” a process that apparently required repeating ten years later.⁶

When Clueless became a television show, it, along with Sabrina the Teenage Witch (ABC, 1996–2000; WB, 2000–2003), represented the crest of a similar televisual wave.⁷ Picked up by ABC after a bidding war, Clueless was paired with Sabrina to round out its family-oriented TGIF programming block and to attract young female viewers.⁸ A year later, Clueless was moved to parent company Viacom’s fledging UPN network to attract a similar audience. Clueless staked out an audience for its multimedia franchise that would later define the WB with programs like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which the Hollywood Reporter originally described as “sort of ‘Clueless’ meets ‘Dracula’”; Dawson’s Creek; and Felicity (WB, 1998–2002).⁹

Clueless can be seen not only as the start of a wave of 1990s teen films and an early iteration of niche teen programming but also as a strong example of convergence culture through its multimedia franchise, driven by the conglomeration that characterized the mid-1990s. The movie Clueless had originally been conceived as a television show called No Worries, when Fox asked Amy Heckerling to develop a television show about high school focused on the popular kids.¹⁰ Although Fox ultimately abandoned the project, in part because it desired a...