The Commercial Power of Context

The dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, the puppies of Paw Patrol, wizards of Harry Potter, and the spaceships and blasters of Star Wars. The halls of the house of big commercial franchises are decorated with IP that created incredible stories to be told within a broadly understood recognizable context.

So, what is context? For commercial franchise narratives, it is the setting and elements within which your story is told. Recognizable context means that we can understand the broad strokes of where and how the story exists without having to spend too much storytelling time explaining it. Context can also lend expectation to the themes and ideas of the story.

Robots, dragons, dinosaurs, spaceships, sword and sorcery, vampires, monsters, superheroes, cars, animals; there are literally hundreds of iconic and recognizable context categories that exist in human storytelling. All have been shaped by shared human experience. It is from this that they have gained their narrative power, functioning like handles and seat belts to the stories we create, quickly bringing the audience along for the ride.

There is a powerful truth in saying that recognizable context can enable commercial franchise success. This is most especially true in kids’ properties because children are learning about their world. Creating a story without clear and recognizable context means having to do a lot more storytelling to explain it and risking a lack of relevance or familiarity to connect to the story. You can absolutely evolve parts of the context to create marvelous fantasy such as animals living in neighborhoods or dogs driving rescue vehicles. In all cases, the recognizable context is giving your story a big boost in understanding and wish fulfillment for the kids.

Interestingly, the benefit of having some recognizable context extends far beyond kids’ properties to wrap its arms around all demographics and interest groups.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that we should all hop on tropes for the commercial stories we create. Every category of context is quite broad with many ideas and possibilities that live there from the shared human experiences that built them. As storytellers and creators, we can gain the benefit from context while being wildly creative and inventive about how we use them.

As an example, let’s talk about Dreamworks’ Dragons. When Dreamworks was in the early days of pre-greenlight dev on How To Train Your Dragon, I was called in to help evaluate the narrative for the franchise commercial potential of the property. My first step was to understand what the worldwide shared experience around dragon stories and mythologies looked like. If the story could tap into the most powerful aspects of that shared mythology, it could be big. Dragons are a universally shared context even though worldwide dragon myths vary.

Some fascinating insights emerged as we did that narrative research. Dragons, all throughout history and throughout the world, almost always represented something wild, emerging, untamed, unfamiliar, and unexplained. To have contact with a dragon usually profoundly changes the hero. Lo and behold, dragons weren’t just hungry creatures. They are a transformative happening. One way of looking at shared dragon mythology is that it represents the distilled essence of changing from an adolescent to an adult. As adolescents, you are suddenly awash in confusing and scary changes. These emerging physical changes bring with them conflict and ideas that we must engage with to be forever altered. It is a threshold we must pass whether we like it or not. Aside from the weird body changes, we are exploring how to exercise our will and it puts us in conflict with parts of the world we have had our childhood within. The dragon rises. It is the journey of every teenager throughout time. The story had found its center, and it was completely aligned with the broader shared mythology that walks through the door with the idea of dragons but in an innovative way. The talented producers, directors, art directors, story team, and more all came together to create surprise with something so singular but so right about dragons, within a super cool recognizable context. Even the world that was created felt teenage. It was all rough edges, wild, jutting, strong, and unpredictable.

The narrative you choose to tell can elevate the ideas in the context or subvert them. Both can be very powerful. Subversion is often the surprise we did not expect. The knight in space (Star Wars). Dinosaurs in the modern world (Jurassic Park). The combination of context subversion with recognizable context is a magical mixture that is not easy to get right, but when it works, it is thrilling and a powerful commercial engine.

There are no rules as to how much subversion is too much or too little. What you subvert, and how it highlights your characters, meaning, and benefit, are all part of your toolkit to create something that is deeply relevant, gets your audience’s attention, and gives them handles to love and understand the story in a way that they will want to become fans and adopt it into their lives.

Working within one of the broad contexts does not make the story derivative if you find a unique subversion or a new way to frame the core context itself. There are reasons why these categories of context are strong and recognizable. Newness for newness’ sake doesn’t really achieve much beyond creating more work for your audience to understand your story.

Creating an idea that has little frame of reference for the audience can be unique, but doesn’t necessarily position you well for franchise power. Take Disney’s release of Strange World. Very clever concept built around a somewhat esoteric meaning about balance and acceptance. The world is wholly invented, touting a log line of: “Journey to a place where nothing is as it appears.” There is not a lot of intuitive relationship to a recognizable context. The worldbuilding of Strange World is highly inventive but not recognizable.

When we look at IP like Mario, we see an IP that is full of subversion but still maintains some contextual entry points for us to relate. Plumbers are working guys who fix things. The strange fantasy world is accessed and navigated through sewer pipes. The rest is pure and wondrous subversion.

There are endless examples of using recognizable context very powerfully across the world of commercial IP. I hope you have enjoyed our fly over for consideration as you develop your own projects.

Cheers, Kevin

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