When Star Wars went to games, those games didn’t just enact film events they showed us what life would be like for a Jedi trainee or a bounty hunter. When Star Wars moved into print, its novels expanded the timeline to show us events not contained in the film trilogies, or recast the stories around secondary characters, as did the Tales of the Cantina series, which fleshes out those curious-looking aliens in the background of the original movie. When Indiana Jones went to television, for example, it exploited the medium’s potential for extended storytelling and character development: the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles showed us the character take shape against the backdrop of various historical events and exotic environments. Hollywood might well study the ways that Lucasfilm has managed and cultivated its Indiana Jones and Star Wars franchises. So far, the most successful transmedia franchises have emerged when a single creator or creative unit maintains control over the franchise. If media companies reward that demand, viewers will feel greater mastery and investment deny it and they stomp off in disgust. In reality, audiences want the new work to offer new insights into the characters and new experiences of the fictional world. Hollywood acts as if it only has to provide more of the same, printing a Star Treklogo on so many widgets. Nobody wants to consume a steady diet of second-rate novelizations!įranchise products are governed too much by economic logic and not enough by artistic vision. These failures account for why sequels and franchises have a bad reputation. The current licensing system typically generates works that are redundant (allowing no new character background or plot development), watered down (asking the new media to slavishly duplicate experiences better achieved through the old), or riddled with sloppy contradictions (failing to respect the core consistency audiences expect within a franchise). We need a new model for co-creation-rather than adaptation-of content that crosses media. At the same time, film producers don’t know the game market very well or respect those genre elements which made something like Tomb Raider successful. The current structure is hierarchical: film units set licensing limits on what can be done in games based on their properties. Each industry sector has specialized talent, but the conglomerates lack a common language or vision to unify them. Even within the media conglomerates, units compete aggressively rather than collaborate. While the technological infrastructure is ready, the economic prospects sweet, and the audience primed, the media industries haven’t done a very good job of collaborating to produce compelling transmedia experiences. And in addition, all evidence suggests that computers don’t cancel out other media instead, computer owners consume on average significantly more television, movies, CDs, and related media than the general population. Younger consumers have become information hunters and gatherers, taking pleasure in tracking down character backgrounds and plot points and making connections between different texts within the same franchise. For our generation, the hour-long, ensemble-based, serialized drama was the pinnacle of sophisticated storytelling, but for the next generation, it is going to seem, well, like less than child’s play. By design, Pokemon unfolds across games, television programs, films, and books, with no media privileged over any other. The kids who have grown up consuming and enjoying Pokemon across media are going to expect this same kind of experience from The West Wing as they get older. Everything about the structure of the modern entertainment industry was designed with this single idea in mind-the construction and enhancement of entertainment franchises.Īnd the push isn’t just coming from the big media companies. The move toward digital effects in film and the improved quality of video game graphics means that it is becoming much more realistic to lower production costs by sharing assets across media. Let’s face it: we have entered an era of media convergence that makes the flow of content across multiple media channels almost inevitable.
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