Originally published April 8, 2014. Updated April 13, 2018.
Anghus Houvouras on the zombiefication of Hollywood…
Welcome to our undead culture. Everything dead lives again. Where no franchise ever dies. Death does not exist for the franchise. Only spaces between reboots. Before we get too deep into this, I’ll concede that certain franchises are invincible. Iconic characters like Batman and Spider-Man are impervious Goliaths of market recognition that will be adapted into movies and television shows in perpetuity. These characters were around before most of us were born and will live on long after we die. My focus here isn’t on the most popular franchises that venture forth. Our most famous superheroes… James Bond…Sherlock Holmes… These are enduring characters that have a history. I’m talking about the franchises whose zombiefication seems to defy conventional logic.
It’s not just the that Hollywood seems hellbent on raising long dead franchises. It’s the depths they’re willing to plummet in order to try and strike franchise gold. I knew a few people who reacted rather comically to the announcement that the 1980’s neon stained cartoon Jem as being resuscitated. Certainly that felt like the bottom of the barrel. Then this past week we learned that Key & Peele were brining back Police Academy. A franchise that already lived far beyond it’s life expectancy with seven movies and a short lived TV series. And yet, it lives again thanks to a studio system that is willing to bring old franchises back from the dead like Doctor Frankenstein digging up corpses from the pop culture landscape with frightening frequency.
Even the good franchises are feeling the impact of zombiefication. Like zombies, these franchises are multiplying. Batman isn’t just a movie and a kids cartoon anymore. He’s so famous his zip code is getting it’s own live action TV show later this year with Gotham. They’re strip mining new franchise opportunities. Scraping every conceivable corner of a character until they have enough to create potential profit.
The entertainment landscape is starting to look like an episode of The Walking Dead. Originality is a dwindling number of survivors making their way through an unforgiving apocalyptic landscape where the threat of being devoured by rapidly multiplying zombie franchises seems inevitable.
The franchise apocalypse is upon us.
Anghus Houvouras is a North Carolina based writer and filmmaker. His latest work, the novel My Career Suicide Note, is available from Amazon. Follow him on Twitter.
