Adaptations in the Franchise Era: 2001–16 by Kyle Meikle (review)

As the 1980s drew to a close, Dudley Andrew declared, "It is time for adaptation studies to take a sociological turn."¹ His call opened the way for the incorporation of literary and cultural theories such as intertextuality into adaptation studies. A few decades later, Kyle Meikle has issued a new call to adaptation studies in the franchise era, an era in which adaptations have become "characteristically diffuse and unstable."² Meikle draws a new, extended map for adaptation studies that includes the interactive and adaptive play of touch-screen technologies, self-broadcasting, streaming platforms, porn parodies, theme parks, cosplays, and board games, to examine their relationship to Google trends (and Google's tracking of top search queries), algorithms, and changing copyright laws. Meikle claims that as participation and interactivity have grown, the distinction between adaptations and franchises has become complex and blurry, which requires a new approach beyond readily available definitions of adaptation. By avoiding a linear model based on the formulation from novel to film, or X to Y, Meikle's monograph covers a tremendous number of examples and their various connections to one another to trace franchised adaptations' "scope, legality, interactivity, and physicality" between 2001 and 2016.³

Meikle begins by discussing the ways franchises offer their audiences multiple points of entry into the "process" and "product" of adaptation, and the factors contributing to the expansion of adaptations and franchises. Investigating the web of intertextual links in the world of adaptation, Meikle claims that we are in the era of "Now a Major Motion Picture Franchise" rather than "Now a Major Motion Picture."⁴ He sees the franchise as a creative, liberating force that can fight against top-down industry productions while also acknowledging critiques that highlight their conservative, capitalist, and oppressive power. In his approach to franchises, Meikle places adaptations in a central position, one around which other products and processes develop. He writes: "If adaptations offered producers a foundational preawareness for kick-starting franchises, then adaptations also offered producers a foundational way to shape those franchises."⁵ In addition to centering adaptations, Meikle reminds us of forgotten or disregarded connections between adaptations and franchises. Referring to Thomas Leitch's observations on Sherlock Holmes stories, as well as franchised characters like Dracula, Tarzan, and Frankenstein's monster, which Leitch calls "fictional franchises," Meikle claims that even though the significant connection between adaptations and franchises became clearly visible in the 2000s, the links between the two have always been there, and these productions acted like franchises even if they weren't acknowledged by many scholars as such.⁶ Thus, he invites adaptation scholars to reevaluate their earlier analyses of the novel-film debate and its impact on other media products.

Referring to the "politics of repetition and variation," in his second chapter, "Streaming Adaptations," Meikle highlights commonalities between the industry's "Now a Major Motion Picture" rhetoric and streaming platforms' "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" tags. Both attract knowing and unknowing audiences, and hence use and misuse their source texts. According to Meikle, the ability to predict audience tastes and expectations is a key feature of platforms like Amazon and Netflix; however, their logic is not so very different from that of earlier adaptation practices, in which the industry catered to the tastes of its audiences by adapting best-selling novels. He claims that algorithms of the streaming networks not only work in the same way as the industry's affiliative strategies—perhaps even more effectively!—but also share characteristics with a franchise mentality in which industry and audience activity oscillate reciprocally.

In the first two chapters, Meikle invites scholars to think about franchises and their strategies as akin to the process of adaptation. In the third chapter, "Fannish Adaptations," Meikle analyzes the impact of changing levels of audience participation on issues of ownership. According to Meikle, the distinction between fan fiction and adaptation was quite clear...