Editor’s note: By even the indefensibly prolix standards of this blog, the following essay—an analytical piece on Hollywood mega-franchises and how audiences wind up serving them more than they serve us—is a lengthy one. Accordingly, “In the Multiverse of Madness” will be published in two separate parts, with the concluding installment following this one by a week. I thank you in advance for your time and attention, neither of which I take for granted.
In last month’s post, I proffered that when a fan-favorite media franchise no longer serves us—when we come to recognize some of the popular fictions we’ve cherished embody values we no longer endorse, and potentially even threaten to stand in the way of where we need to go—often the best thing we can do for ourselves is to let it go, purposely and permanently.
Letting go is not about “canceling” (someone like disgraced geek god Joss Whedon) or boycotting (the films of, say, Woody Allen); it’s not about taking action at all. Instead, letting go is not doing something any longer—not renting out any more space in your life or in your head to the likes of Whedon or Allen, or even to the culturally defining popular narratives whose very ubiquity we take as a God-given absolute: Star Wars, Star Trek, Harry Potter, DC and Marvel, to name but a sampling.
Despite the universal prevalence of those transmedia brands—not merely the plethora of movies and TV shows, but the licensed apparel and iPhone cases, the die-cast collectables and plush toys—we can, if we choose, be done with any or all those franchises as of… right now. To learn to live without them entirely. And happily. Even lifelong, hardcore superfans can learn to let go of their preferred multimedia pastimes.
It’s both easier and harder than you may think.
But wait! What if you happen to genuinely enjoy Star Wars or Star Trek or DC or Marvel? If you’re a fan, and some or all of those entertainment franchises add value to your life’s experience, by all means, disregard this post’s advice. Though perhaps first consider this:
For most of Hollywood history, the movie business has needed a hostage buyer, a customer with little choice but to purchase the product. First, this was the theatre chains, which the studios owned, or controlled, until 1948, when the Supreme Court forced the studios to sell them on antitrust grounds. In the eighties and nineties, video stores partly filled the role. But, increasingly, the hostage buyer is us.
Today, the major franchises are commercially invulnerable because they offer up proprietary universes that their legions of fans are desperate to reënter on almost any terms. These reliable sources of profit are now Hollywood’s financial bedrock.
Stephen Metcalf, “How Superheroes Made Movie Stars Expendable,” New Yorker, May 21, 2018
Consider: How many of us are unwitting “hostage buyers”—fans who continue to subscribe to certain multimedia franchises no longer out of pleasure, but lately out of habit? Out of decades-long conditioning? We may watch Star Wars, for instance, simply because we’ve always watched Star Wars, even if we can’t truly recall the last time we actually enjoyed it the way we did when we were ten years old—with pure and wondrous abandon. Bad word-of-mouth will steer us clear of a one-off bomb like Blackhat or King Arthur: Legend of the Sword or The Happytime Murders, but it’ll merely lower our expectations for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and X-Men: Dark Phoenix and Terminator: Dark Fate, not deter us from seeing those umpteenth sequels for ourselves.
When that happens—when we’re willing to spend our money, time, and attention (our three primary modes of currency) on a product we know in advance is shit—we’re no longer fans of those franchises so much as brand loyalists. Habit buyers, if not outright hostage buyers. And it can be hard to recognize that in ourselves—harder than we might realize. I was still reading Batman comics into my thirties, who-knows-how-many years after I stopped enjoying them—long after a once-joyful pleasure became an interminably joyless obligation. So, why was I still reading and collecting them?
Because I’d always read comics, from the time I was a kid; I’d buy them at the corner candy store in my Bronx neighborhood with loose change I’d rummaged from the couch cushions and reread each one a thousand times. I’d share them with my grade-school gang, and vice versa. I’d collected them for as long as I could remember, so it truly never occurred to me a day might come when they no longer added value to my life—when they’d outlived their onetime reliable purpose. And for years after I reached that point of terminally diminished returns, I’d continue to spend money, to say nothing of time and attention, on a habit I wasn’t enjoying—that did nothing but clutter my home with more worthless shit that went straight into indefinite “storage” in the closet. Why the hell did I do that?
Because I’d ceased to be a fan and had instead become an obedient brand loyalist—an institutionalized hostage buyer. And, to be sure, corporate multimedia initiatives—which is to say the those so-called “mega-franchises” from which there is always one more must-see/must-have sequel, prequel, sidequel, spinoff, TV series, tie-in comic, videogame, and branded “collectible” being produced—very much count on our continued, unchallenged fidelity to once-beloved concepts and characters…
… and they are doubling down on the billion-dollar bet they’ve placed on it:
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