This article explores the pressures placed on filmmakers and studios to create successful franchises and also the pitfalls of failure

1. From Harry Potter to Narnia: the
pressure on film franchises to
perform
In the world of film franchises, it's billions or bust –
anything less than Harry Potter-style success spells the
end for a series. Cath Clarke reports on how Narnia went
to the brink
Dumped, downsized, delayed ... The
Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn
Treader. Photograph: 20th Century Fox
The omens suggest there may be a
happy ending in sight in the saga of the
Narnia franchise. Last week snow was
falling – as if Aslan himself had ordered
it – as The Voyage of the Dawn
Treader, the third in the Chronicles of Narnia series, was
premiered as the royal film performance. (Rumour has it the
Queen shed a tear or two; maybe it was from relief – last year she
had to sit through The Lovely Bones.) But in 2008 it was different
story: it looked like curtains for Narnia after
Disneyunceremoniously dumped the series – disappointed with the
performance of film No 2, Prince Caspian. Production of Dawn
Treader was downsized, then delayed; for a while it looked likely
that it wouldn't get made at all, and the projected seven-film series
would be cut off at the ankles.
It wasn't the first high-profile franchise to be rejected by its parent
studio. A year earlier, the planned trilogy of Philip Pullman's His
Dark Materials was canned after the first film, The Golden
Compass, failed to live up to expectations at the US box-office. To
the casual observer, neither Caspian nor Compass looks much like
a failure: both took hundreds of millions of dollars. But there is no
margin for error in the new generation of multi-film, factory-line
franchises – with their whopping CGI bills and budgets that would
keep a despot in military trifles. Get it right, like Harry Potter ($6bn
and counting) or Twilight ($1.7bn), and it's golden. But films have
to match those takings to have got it right. Anything less is a
failure.
Franchises have been around longer than Bond has been

2. bothering blondes, or Dracula has been sucking blood. What
has changed is that now Hollywood studios are desperately
seeking properties to nail their sails to, committing upfront – in
theory at least – to making a string of films. Mike Goodridge, editor
of the film industry paper Screen International, compares new-
formula franchises such as Harry Potter and Twilight to Saturday
morning serials, with storylines that run like a thread through the
movies: "It's a dream situation for a studio to have a captive
audience, which will inevitably come back for the next helping." As
Harry Potter and Twilght grind to a close, eyes are on the next
prize: which might just be Suzanne Collins's post-apocalyptic
teen trilogy The Hunger Games; Kaya Scodelario and Chloe
Moretz are in the running for the lead.
"If you can pull them off, they are a license to print money," says
director Michael Apted. He has been on the other side, too – he
was already hard at work on The Dawn Treader when Disney
pulled the plug. Did he think it was all over? "For a bit."
What's Apted's verdict on Prince Caspian – the film that prompted
Disney to bail? "I don't think it did go wrong. I don't think it was
messed up. I just think they just took it for granted they were on to
a successful franchise like Lord of the Rings." In reality, adapting
CS Lewis is a trickier proposition than Tolkien or JK Rowling. Each
of the seven Narnia titles is its own universe, with a changing cast
of characters. "Prince Caspian is much darker than the first book,"
says Apted. There was less of the wonder and magic of The Lion,
The Witch and the Wardrobe; it was bigger and scarier, with two
monster battles. With The Dawn Treader, Apted says he has gone
back to Narnia basics with a fairytale adventure on the high seas,
featuring a stonking comic turn by 17-year-old Will Poulter as
cousin Eustace.
In 2008, after Disney backed out, a replacement studio, Fox, was
found within a month. Still, Apted must have felt like he was
captaining a sinking ship. "It was daunting. We were put in the
position that we had to retrieve the franchise, both in terms of tone
– to make it more family-friendly – and to do it for less money." If
appearances are anything to go by, he is exactly the man you'd
want in a crisis. A 69-year-old veteran (his credits include Enigma
and The World is Not Enough), he is dry as bone and seemingly
unflappable. His budget was shrunk to $140m. Which is still a
scary amount of money ("well, you don't think about that").

3. How poorly, exactly, did Prince Caspian perform? It went to No 1
in the US, and was Disney's second most successful film of 2008.
"When you do the math, it doesn't look quite so pretty," says
Apted. "The second film cost more and made less." He's right:
Prince Caspian took $420m worldwide. It cost $225m to make, and
the same again to market. By comparison The Lion the Witch and
the Wardrobe took $745m, having been made for $180m.
There was another layer of intrigue to the saga: bad blood
between Disney and Walden Media, the company that holds the
rights to the Narnia books and which co-financed and co-produced
the movies, and which is owned by Phil Anschutz, a billionaire
conservative Christian. Apted describes a situation in which
everybody was blaming everybody else: "There was a lot of ill
feeling. I think that poisoned the water a bit."
If $420m in box office receipts isn't enough to secure the future of
a franchise, how much is? These days $1bn is the new benchmark
for a bona-fide smash (though only seven films so far have made
that much). What that means for audiences is that if you have a
pulse you are in the target demographic. Here's Screen
International's Mike Goodridge again: "I hate to say it, but with
these films you have to hit what the studios call the 'four quadrant
market': men, women, young and old. You have to hit everybody
and then you have a genuine phenomenon."
Prince Caspian, it was thought, pandered too much to teenage
boys. Fox and Walden took no chances with The Dawn Treader.
Earlier this year Christian leaders and assorted CS Lewis experts
were invited to a "Narnia Summit" in LA. "We went through every
line of dialogue and every scene with them to make sure it was a
really faithful adaptation," Walden Media's president Michael
Flaherty told Christianity Today at the time.
One obvious solution, surely, would be to make the movies more
cheaply. No, says Michael Apted. While he was happy to trim the
budget of The Dawn Treader ("I wanted to make sure the
technology didn't overwhelm the emotion of the film"), he says
swingeing cuts to fantasy films are out of the question. "If you
penny pinch, you're dead. Audiences are so savvy, and if you do it
on the cheap you're out of it."
One person who disagrees wholeheartedly with that is Philip
Pullman, whose His Dark Materials books looked set to become

4. another major franchise. When New Line Cinema – which was
behind The Lord of the Rings – filmed the first instalment, it was
the most expensive movie it had ever made. Released under the
book's US title, The Golden Compass, it did roaring business
overseas, but just $70m in the US – and because New Line had
sold overseas rights to the film in order to fund the production, it
didn't make its money back on the international box office. It was a
crucial failure for New Line, which was absorbed into its parent
company, Warner Bros, shortly afterwards.
Pullman reckons we are now seeing diminishing returns from CGI.
"We don't believe it any more. Or we know that it's only
computers." If there were ever to be a Golden Compass remake,
he has an entirely different film in mind. "I would rather it was
made in someone's shed with tin cans and bits of rope. I think it
would be more involving – to be made for about 10 quid, rather
than $200m."
Talk to Pullman and you get an impression of the head of steam
that builds behind a mega-budget franchise. He was delighted with
the young actress Dakota Blue Richards, who was cast as his 12-
year-old heroine Lyra ("she was absolutely terrific"). The film-
makers looked at 10,000 girls before finding her. But she would be
too old for the part if the His Dark Materials franchise was
resurrected. "They would have to recast. It's lost really. It's gone."
(Makers of franchises featuring kid actors have to move quickly –
the little blighters have a habit of getting bigger.)
The curious case of The Golden Compass's poor US performance
has been widely put down to the controversy surrounding its anti-
religious themes. Though fudged somewhat in the film itself, the
outcry from the Catholic League ("atheism for kids") and the rest
may have been fatal. "The Golden Compass didn't hit America's
heartland, and that's what killed it, really," says Goodridge.
Pullman says: "It was always going to be a difficult film for that
reason. The only way to do it is to take the issue bravely to the
front and wave it like a banner."
When studios first looked at his trilogy, did they assume they had
the next Lord of the Rings on their hands? "Oh they always think X
is the next Y," Pullman says. "They have no idea at all about
looking forward. Publishers are just the same. They can only see
what's coming in terms of what's been. Nobody was looking for the
first Harry Potter, only JK Rowling. Studio and publishers: I don't

5. rate them very highly as originators or visionaries."
And it's not just writers like Pullman who believe there is a failure
of imagination at work. Here's Goodridge: "The problem with
Hollywood at the moment is that they need an identifiable brand
before they go into an expensive movie production. Which is a
problem for creativity." So while there are trend-bucking examples
in the system – the auteur-cleverness of Christopher Nolan's
brooding Batman movies, for one – overall we're looking at reboot
ad nauseum: Superman again, a Spider-Man rework. Says
Goodridge: "It's no secret. Hollywood is scrabbling to put on the
screen properties people already know. They can't take a risk on
original ideas any more."