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posts about #failedfranchises more → 
Why Is It So Hard To Start A New Franchise?
San Francisco, 1:45 AM
Mon Nov 9
12 posts in the last 24 hours
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Why Is It So Hard To Start A New Franchise? |
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12/03/08
Secondly, I don't think that the X-files is dead. that show was so solid that it's still compelling today. Fringe looks tepid compared with it!
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The degree of success is how to cleverly reinterpret old elements (Bat-Mite, anyone?). Radical departure from the formula spells irritation from the fan base. (Good luck, JJ Abrhams!)
12/02/08
Of course, I think video games will be the test bed for starting up franchises by embracing transmedia to build an audience before it ever hits the big screen. Deadspace is a good example of a game that has a prequel comic and most likely a movie. Our next big screenwriters could be coming from game development....
12/02/08
;)
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not the best comic ever made, but its worth it if you're a fan of the movies.
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That said, top of my short list of old series I'd love to see rebooted for 2009:
The Incredible Robert Baldick Created by Terry "Daleks" Nation in 1972, you've got an awesome premise: An eccentric victorian gentleman and scientist travels the countryside in a bullet-proof custom-built railway carriage, with his pet owl, and sidekick, John Rhys-Davies. Using the Holmesean Method, they solve all sorts of crimes using the latest in steampunk science. Additionally, In the first episode, Robert visits a haunted priory and discovers that the cause of the psychic disturbance is in fact a small black box buried on the site over 1000 years earlier. A box that quite clearly contains higly advanced micro-circuitry. (though with his 19th century understanding of science, he can only begin to speculate as to it's function)
12/02/08
12/03/08
I forgot to mention that there was a very good reason why the pilot was never made into a full series: It was boring as hell.
I honestly don't know how they managed to make it suck as much as it did. The premise was decent, and the very Quatermass-y pilot script would have fit right in with the episodes of Doctor Who being filmed at the time. (I'd accuse them of ripping off 'The Dæmons' from the year before, but that would definitely be a case of the pot calling the kettle black) What made it worse, was the fact that Terry Nation was quite clearly trying to create a character that was 100% pure action scientist awesome, but instead we got a guy who stands around behaving like a condescending prick to everybody who crosses his path until the requisite number of minor characters die under mysterious circumstances, then he grudgingly decides to do something about it, confronts a penciled-in-at-the-last-minute fear of cobwebs, and smashes the small black recipe box of the gods.
Alas, I think the producers made a huge blunder in casting Robert Hardy in the lead role. He's fine playing overbearing older brothers, high court judges, and Winston Churchill, but not exactly Captain Charisma.
12/02/08
Creating a "show bible" for an imaginary universe and putting so much work into planning what might never be onscreen or used is tough.
Also look at (still in its early weeks): Fringe, which was repeatedly dogged as an X-Files knockoff (not to mention all those other X-Files knockoffs out there), but is persisting and finding its own way.
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Look at Music, you give me 5 groups trying to be the next Beatles and I'll give you 5 crap bands. But take 5 groups just doing what they do best and you probably have 3 really good bands on your hands.
And also, don't forget cynicism. The interwebs chews up and spits out any possible franchise before it even hits the theaters so it has weather months of criticism and jeers before anyone has even seen it. That makes it tough for the masses to just sit back and enjoy something warts and all.
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And leave my gorram delusions alone.
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